Hey folks! The conclusion of our look at the Siege of Eregion in Rings of Power will have to wait a week because I am off to a conference this week, the annual meeting of the Society for Military History, this year in Mobile, Alabama! I’m set to talk about how Roman military commanders were prepared for command (below), but as I type this, we also had a fascinating early morning roundtable, organized by Lee Brice on the concept of discipline in ancient Roman and Greek armies; Clausewitz was invoked (drink!) as was Sunzi (that is, Sun Tzu) and even Foucault (bingo!).1 But it was a fascinating discussion where I think the big takeaway is how – despite efforts to treat ‘discipline’ as a single cross-cultural concept – discipline is both several conjoined ideas (synchronization, obedience, systems of rewards and punishments, etc.) and also substantially culturally contingent.
I had hoped to get the blog post done before leaving, but alas, it was not to be. But, so that I don’t leave you with nothing to read, I figure I can give you the abstract to my talk, some of the charts and diagrams I made to illustrate my points, and then a few interesting links.
So my talk for SMH 2025 is “Learning Imperium: Command Preparation in the Middle Republic.” Here is the abstract:
Through the Roman Republic’s remarkable string of military triumphs during the third and second centuries B.C.E., the Romans could boast of relatively few ‘military geniuses.’ Instead, the Roman aristocracy proved itself remarkably adept at churning out a procession of effective, if uninspired, workmanlike generals who were up to the task of managing the increasingly complex logistics and tactical system Rome relied upon for success in conducting simultaneous military operations in multiple theaters at considerable distance. The Romans lacked, however, formal institutions for officer training, a flaw that has been cited as evidence of a more general Roman inability to think and plan strategically. This paper argues that the customary military-political career path of the Roman Republic, the cursus honorum, functioned in the place of such formal institutions, structuring a Roman aristocrat’s career as a series of apprenticeships under the eyes of more experienced commanders. Performance was in turn evaluated through elections by Roman voters and through assignments by the Senate, while time spent as ‘back-benchers’ in the Senate between assignments served to homogenize strategic vision. This system served to ‘mass produce’ Roman generals who, if not endowed with genius, were nevertheless capable and reliable instruments of Roman strategic policy as set by the Senate.
Now I can’t share the full text of the talk – like most conference papers, it is preliminary and very rough around the edges, representing the beginning of a project that is still under development. But for the presentation, I did draw up some basic charts which I thought might interest you all, so here they are.
Let’s start with this one, a graph of all attested Roman commands (defined here by me as a magistrate or promagistrate confirmed to have either an army or a territorial provincia) by year for the good stretch of Livy we have from 218 to 167. There are some gaps – those sharp downturns in the 170s are mostly instances where Livy hasn’t reported what the praetors are doing or is giving an incomplete picture of pro-magistrate assignments, so the real line should probably be a bit steadier and somewhat higher on the back end.
I also made, simply for illustrative purposes to help an audience mostly of more modern military historians keep track of how the Roman career path works, a chart of the standard progression a Roman aristocrat’s political-military career might take (though I have stuck to militarily relevant roles, thus the absence of aediles, tribunes of the plebs, etc):
And finally, to illustrate a point about how an up-and-coming (rather than senior) Roman aristocrat might experience the Senate, I decided to make up a chart of the ‘typical’ composition of the Roman Senate in the Second Century, given our typical assumptions about life expectancy and mortality in the Roman world and assuming most of these fellows are holding their offices at or near the earliest eligible age.2 The result is a very approximate breakdown, but perhaps a useful one:
Finally, some links!
First off, I’ve been on some podcasts! On the fantasy front, I recently talked Tolkien with the folks over at the Prancing Pony Podcast again, this time about some of the early history of Gondor and Rohan contained in the appendices and Unfinished Tales. On the ancient history front, I also had a long discussion with Liberal Currents’ Samantha Hancox-Li on everyone’s least favorite murderous Roman dictator, L. Cornelius Sulla, both on what he did and a bit on why the newest new right seems oddly obsessed with such a negative figure.
And for something to read, data journalist and podcaster David H. Montgomery over with YouGov put together a fascinating survey of American’s attitudes towards the European Middle Ages. Some expected, if unfortunate results, in that Americans still very much believe in a ‘dark ages,’ but also some surprises, like the relatively low recognition of Saladin, who I had thought had a bit more pop-cultural presence as the archetypal ‘noble Muslim ruler.’ For more learned commentary on the results, David Perry and Matthew Gabriel (the authors of The Bright Ages) discussed the results in some interesting detail.
So we’ll be back next week, when we’ll close out our look at the Siege of Eregion in Rings of Power. After that, I am planning at least a brief discussion on the non-existence of ancient ‘special forces,’ mulling over a ‘Brief History of Classical Decadence’ and there’s also been requests for a deeper look at the Carthaginian military system of the Punic Wars. So more to look forward to, once I am back from Mobile!
Motion to also drink whenever anyone mentions Sunzi/Sun Tzu!
Clausewitz and Sunzi/Sun Tzu are the top two guys to quote in military history, but who is number three?
Mahan?
Luttwak? Azar Gat? Liddell Hart? Jomini?
Dennis or Alfred?
Jomini!
John Boyd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist)
I thought it was Jomini, who I’ve been led to believe was a competitor to Clausewitz in their own time, but is less known today.
That last diagram is surprising, I wasn’t expecting 1/3 or so of the senate to be at least ex-Praetors and 1/10 to be consulares. While still a minority, it’s not a tiny proportion; compare it to modern parliament / assemblies where few sitting members are former ministers (and even fewer former senior cabinet ministers). In a way it diminishes the influence of an individual ex-consul (because they’re only one of many; but in another it increases the collective weight of ex-consuls.
There would be a lot more former ministers in a parliament, if each minister could serve as such for only a year.
I seem to recall Dr. Devereaux remarking a few years ago that this was a deliberate feature of the Roman system. The top positions were held in rotation very frequently, so that all the most ambitious and popular figures in the Roman state could receive these honors and expect to ‘get their turn.’
Even then, many would retire rather than continue – you don’t see Tony Blair hanging around as an MP these days, and Obama didn’t campaign for a senate seat in 2016. The rapid rotation of Roman magistrates is well known (and a deliberate power-sharing arrangement amongst the aristocracy), but it’s a separate observation that for ~10% of senators that made it to consul, that achievement was closer to the *middle* of their political career than the end. Having the epitome of their career positioned this way leads to a large elder statesman body that have already made it to the top, but continue steering the state anyway. There isn’t really a modern analogy to that (perhaps director’s boards in the private sector, but not in politics).
I wonder how frequently would they have been present, especially relative to the more junior senate members? Modern (post-1700) parliaments are generally part-time, and variably attended even when sitting. Others that look even more like the Senate, e.g. by having some members with lifetime appointments — I’m particularly thinking of the House of Lords — AFAIK have even lower average attendance.
I think from descriptions of how consuls might act towards the senate because they know they’re going to end up back there for far longer than they are in office, there’s both a strong expectation of turning up as frequently as possible, and desire to because one can exert power for a lot longer. Being an ex-consul in the Senate means that you get the deference both of most other senators and of every consul that follows after you. Where you get to be among the first to speak in all future deliberations, and your opinion will hold significant weight in all future policy decisions. There’s a lot more incentive to show up than for the junior senator whose only real contribution to the debate is to chime “what he said” after an ex-consul says his piece.
Off the top of my head, quorum was relatively low, and even that wasn’t always met (if memory serves me right, including during the Catiline crisis?) There were also several measures that made it a legal obligation for senators to attend senate meetings unless there was a good reason not to. As always, that someone felt the need to pass such laws suggest that it wasn’t happening otherwise. Things probably got worse with the enlarged senate post-Sulla,
Modern Anglosphere culture has its own version of “up or out” in that almost everyone will quit politics rather than move to a lesser job, with those that stick around after a major demotion usually a marker of someone who has no real prospects outside of politics and needs the gig.
Ex-leaders move into informal advisory roles or occassional special assignments when prestige and authoritas without active responsibilities are called for.
Salient observation. I suppose the Roman system, because it was highly competitive and tied closely to aristocratic prestige, could be called “Up and stick around no matter what”.
Closest I can think of is Singapore, which has Senior Ministers, who are former prime or deputy prime ministers and have an ‘advisory’ role to the prime minister.
Commonwealth nations also have the privy council, generally made up of former cabinet ministers and occasionally leaders of opposition parties.
I was thinking of the privy council too, but that’s purely honorary these days: they advise the King, and he only has ceremonial powers left to begin with.
The consulares (and ex-praetors) weren’t purely advisors either. They led the Senate, who were at least as important as the active magistrates when it came to deciding strategy / policy – with the magistrates then deciding how to implement it.
I feel that discussion on the different elements of discipline and how culturally specific aspects of it are is *incredibly* relevant to workplace culture (and really, any time humans get together and try to accomplish a shared goal). I would love to hear some of the thoughts there if you or anyone else involved want to turn it into a blog post.
I recall reading something about how US business culture in the 1950s was influenced by the fact that so many of the managers had been in the military during WWII. Possibly a sideline in a discussion of “The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit.”
There were proportionally so many former servicemen in American business post-WWII that government-issued (Army, mostly) slacks became acceptable business attire. A lot of the giving-and-following-orders habits probably ran in the opposite direction though, with business culture aped by the military, which explains a lot of the cultural differences between the Americans and the European Allied militaries.
Could you expand on this a bit, for an ignorant reader?
Public common culture in the United States has always, albeit with caveats about outgroups etc., idealized egalitarianism and open disagreement. This is not how the US military works, culturally, and it is likewise not how Americans expect workplaces to function. Americans have always had a sense that by accepting a job and entering a place of work, a person is suspending many of their basic rights; free expression and a relaxed attitude toward hierarchy normally result in disciplinary action and coworkers normally appreciate when such discipline occurs. This is extremely similar to US military culture.
Of course, there’s also the racism, but that is more of a historical thing, right?
Related to “any time humans get together” — it’s quite interesting that the Romans used the same title for the military and the plebeian tribunes. Logically, they would have made this choice if they initially understood the two offices to be analogous in some fashion (purpose, and/or mechanisms, and/or something else). And subsequently, the evolution of the respective offices would have been somewhat influenced by the shared term suggesting borrowing from/imitation of the other.
Is it known which of these two offices came first?
I think that the Military Tribune post is far older than the Tribune of the Plebs (although that latter post was created reasonably early in the Republic’s history) – and was used throughout Latium rather than just in Rome. But I’m not sure you are correct to suggest the posts are analogous in seniority or role because they share a name: the word ‘Tribune’ comes from ‘Tribus’ – from which we get ‘tribe’ but the term means something more like group of clans or sub-division of the Roman people. So I think they are posts which are derived from being representatives of these sub-groups of the state. The Military Tribune is (very originally) the leader of the tribe in war (and so only has a leadership role outside the city), and the Tribune of the Plebs defends the interests of the tribe against overbearing magistrates and nobles, but only in the city itself. I’m no expert so someone please correct me if I am wrong, but they don’t share much beyond the name, which has been derived separately from the same root word.
Actually there originalyl were other tribunes too- in the regnal era you had teh Tribune of the Celeres, which was the commander of the Kings’ personal guard. Which suggests that Tribune was considered something of a commander/leader figure for a body of people. the Tribunes of the Plebs would under that be the “Leader of the Plebs”, which does fit their role.
In that regard, “tribune” would be like our word “captain,” which refers to someone in authority, but in different spheres with different responsibilities. Both the army and navy have captains, but the ranks are not equivalent, and civilian ships and sports teams also have captains. You can find multiple other uses.
I think you’re entirely right there. But I’d say that both military and plebeian tribune do share something in common beyond the name: they represent people representing the grassroots (aka, tribe) up, rather than being part of old regal authority divided down. It’s likely that they’re both relics of older structures before Rome had fully developed into a “state” (rather than a pre-state). In a sense, both types of tribunes are representatives of sub-state groups in the centralise power structures of the state.
FYI, there’s also another type of tribune: consular tribunes, which were a board of 4 – 8 who led the republic for some periods in the 5th century instead of consuls / praetors. But the sources for the early republic are so confused little is certain.
Enjoy Mobile!
Nerdy question: can we estimate how many years a Roman aristocrat would have spent as a Military Tribune? If I recall correctly, you suggested a while back that Scipio Africanus spent about 10 years as a Tribune but I may well have misunderstood you.
Around 250 – 150 BC it was probably about 5 or so. There was 10 years military service required before entering the Senate. The earliest of those years would have been spent in the cavalry, and the later ones as military tribunes. The exact split is unknown, and would have varied person to person anyway, but “about half” is what I’ve seen posited.
Another way to calculate it is that there were ~8 Quaestors per year (varying with date), all of which would have been military tribunes. In a standard year of 2 consular armies of 2 legions, there were 24 military tribunes. So if every military tribune served for 3 years, there would be just enough “graduating” each year to become Quaestors. Of course not every military tribune went on to become a a quaestor (some were already senior senators, some lost the elections, some might not have been interested, etc…) and some years had more or fewer than 4 active legions.
But a guesstimate of 4 or 5 years as a military tribune for a Roman aristocrat during their early 20s seems reasonable.
I think conflating elite units in antiquity with modern special forces may be more a misunderstanding of modern special forces instead of ancient elite units. It’s easy to understand the idea of an elite warrior who does exceptionally well on a battlefield against an opposing army, but a lot of people (including some Russian leadership, apparently) fail to realize that the point of special forces is to avoid a straight up battle with the enemy.
There’s also the standard issues of projecting modern concepts into the past. “Special forces” is part of how we understand the world to work, and everyone thinks their worldview is the normal and proper one for humans to have, so we tend to view other cultures, including those of the past, through the lens of our worldview. And this process is going to always distort our understanding of past societies.
IMO the VDV are no more ‘misused’ in ground assaults than, say, US marines are; they are alike in being organizations that began with narrow roles but attained too much institutional clout and turned themselves into complete armies-within-an-army, far too large and broadly capable for their original missions.
Well, inherently anyway. In the particulars they are being misused in all sorts of senses.
I forgot where I read it, but someone once asked why the navy’s army had its own air force, referring to Marine Corps Aviation. One of the more cynical replies was that the Air Force, the Army’s air force, and the Navy’s air force didn’t see their roles as including transport and air support for the Marines.
As good an excuse as any to link to that famous
Drachinifel video “Ships of the Imperial Japanese Army”:
In Russia, I imagine one use of the VDV is to have a counter to the regular army. Because you never know when you might want one.
Regime security in Russia is handled by the МЧС (Ministry of Emergency Situations). VDV is airborne infantry that got badly chewed up in the opening days of the ongoing 3-day special operation and subsequent fighting because the Russian government doesn’t consider it essential to its survival and now is basically yet another light mechanized infantry.
True, but the kind of regime that wants a second army because it doesn’t trust the first, is going to have some desire for a third army because it doesn’t trust the first two.
I presume that since LG knows how the original acronym is written, they must have enough of a connection to the post-Soviet cultural space to know what I’m about to write.
For everyone else; what МЧС ACTUALLY happens to be is the equivalent of FEMA. If you asked a Russian what they do, one would most likely tell you “they fight wildfires”, because the state news always shows their planes dumping water and their personnel evacuating civilians and clearing firebreaks, etc. – even though in practice, most of RF’s (insufficient) capacity is still with the oblasts’ forestry services and they are only deployed after things have basically gone out of control already (hence them getting shown on all the news.) They also do a good fraction of fire and other safety inspections (i.e. their role in inspecting fishing boats, river ferries, etc. is large enough it actually got put on a stamp alongside firefighting), perform helicopter rescues, do clean-up of other disasters like plane crashes, burst dams or collapsing mine shafts, etc. If anything like Chernobyl ever occurs again, it’ll also fall under their remit.
Now, their personnel often DO carry arms (it’s easy to find footage from news reels of servicemen in their uniforms working in the active wildfire zones with AKs slung behind their backs) and use effectively the same ranking system as the military, so they technically CAN be used for combat, but it is absolutely not what they are designed for, and the Russian government most definitely does NOT consider them “essential to its survival.” Whoever edited Russian Wikipedia page on them must have had fun inserting direct quotes from the agency’s own (Deputy) Ministers complaining about its excess of administrative personnel sitting above the overstretched and underpaid rank-and-file.
I presume LG was following the chain of logic that since the current Defence Minister of Russia, Shoigu, led the МЧС immediately prior to that (which he was doing for around 15 years, since the day it was founded in 1994 – yes, Shoigu had been a Minister since before Putin became President), then it must be really powerful and serve this kind of role. However, this is absolutely not the case. The closest thing to a “second army” in Russia is the National Guard – only formed in 2016 on the basis of the notorious OMON riot police. Those even took part in the invasion early on, when the assumption was that it would end quickly and the main difficulty would lie in suppressing protesters in “reunified” cities. They fought in proper battles too, but not well – some reports connected Ukraine’s 2022 success in Kharkyv Oblast to targeting the sector guarded by them. Nevertheless, they are incomparably more militarily capable than the МЧС – they possess artillery and a sizeable roster of armoured vehicles, for starters.
> is going to have some desire for a third army because it doesn’t trust the first two
According to Wikipedia, there were fewer than 50,000 VDV before the war vs. 345k National Guard (and over half a million regular ground forces.) That’s not it.
P.S. To follow up on “Ministers complaining about the effectiveness of МЧС theme” – there is a really eerie archived interview with Shoigu by a state newspaper back when he still led it. The same man who personally ordered or at least signed off on countless airstrikes in the recent years speaks of being haunted by personally supervising earthquake rescue efforts soon after his appointment (1995 Neftegorsk earthquake), of attempting to keep a man half-buried by a piece of concrete debris alive for 36 hours only for him to die anyway once they lifted it upon his request (since they all knew it’s practically impossible for a person not to die from shock when such a weight is lifted off them) and of seeing a bereaved mother lunge at his personnel once the same happened to her little girl. (To avoid giving the wrong impression, they still managed to rescue some 400 people.) I don’t know whether this should be called cognitive dissonance or something else, but it ought to give one pause regardless.
https://archive.md/20120804015938/http://izvestia.ru/news/369560
> but a lot of people (including some Russian leadership, apparently) fail to realize that the point of special forces is to avoid a straight up battle with the enemy.
RF’s special forces (generically abbreviated as Spetznaz, rather than being a specific unit as too many video games told to too many people) DO get used in that manner – after all, who do you think performed the surprise attack via pipeline in Sudzha? The one where (according to Ukrainians and their boosters, that is) most of the participants suffocated before emerging from it and they killed most of the rest, and it somehow *just happened* to coincide with their rapid and barely organized retreat from Kursk Oblast over the next few days. And of course, the “hybrid” phase of the war in 2014-2015 was dominated by special forces – including the entire takeover of Crimea by “little green men/polite people.” (Hence, the official celebration day of Russian Spetznaz the date of the takeover.) The point is, all of this only works where special forces are NOT expected by their opponent. With the proliferation of various military-grade radars, satellites, digital cameras (including, but not limited to, observation drones), etc. it had become much, much easier to detect anticipate their arrival then ever before, and much of the playbook no longer functions in those conditions.
As stan pointed out below, VDV can be compared to the US Marines in terms of being an overgrown special force. However, that comparison is likely too generous to the VDV, in that while the initial purpose of the Marines to fight in the Pacific is clearly understood and clearly requires some mass to be done properly (though it’s of course arguable just how many personnel and dedicated equipment they really need, and how many of the tasks no longer directly connected to water can just be done by the army), the conceptual flaw at the heart of VDV had been the extreme overestimation of airborne troops’ effectiveness at the heart of Soviet/Russian doctrine, dating back to 1930s.
Back then, Stalin assumed wielding by far the largest army of paratroopers in the world would be the key to USSR’s victories. In practice, those prewar airborne corps had to be thrown into ground combat to plug the gaps and delay German advances almost immediately – in no small part because German air superiority and damage to Soviet airfields made paratrooper operations impossible. Two large-scale airdrop operations did occur in 1942 and one in 1943 – and every time, the forces involved were rapidly scattered and had to break out towards friendly lines with only light equipment and few supplies (in part because ground forces which were meant to link up with them almost never managed to break through the German defences in time), ultimately acting as little more than a very expensive (in terms of both lives and training) distraction. This translated report from a Russian military website (nowadays sadly mainly devoted to contemporary propaganda – hence the archive link) on the most infamous of those operations is illustrative.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250329125456/https://en.topwar.ru/99204-esche-raz-o-vyazemskoy-vozdushno-desantnoy-operacii.html
As the result, VDV received thousands of air-droppable armoured vehicles over the years so that they would not have to fight lightly armed in the rear again – only for the improvements in air defences to render large-scale parachute assaults effectively obsolete, as can be clearly seen today, and leaving the armed forces with a large number of vehicles that are more complex and prone to breakdown than their infantry equivalents while being rather less useful in ground combat due to necessarily lighter armour to enable parachute deployment in the first place. BMD-4, the VDV equivalent of a BMP-3, costed more than a tank according to some reports, yet is extremely vulnerable as it stores tank-caliber shells behind airdrop-level armour. It’s hard (and more than a little distasteful given ongoing events) to speculate how much more effective the (post-)Soviet military would have been if VDV was outright scrapped as a separate combat arm sometime after 1945, but one look at the expenses and military designers’ manpower involved suggests it would have had a not-inconsiderable effect.
There is a strong “dark ages” contingent online, whose ideology combines hostility to religion, support for “science” and “reason,” hostility to traditional sexual values, and a sort of unfocused libertarianism. Overall there is a “tech bro” vibe to the websites that push this view.
Is this observation meant to be a remark on something in this post in particular? It may just be that I’ve had a long day, but I’m not seeing the connection. My apologies if I’m being obtuse.
It’s in response to this bit, I think:
“Some expected, if unfortunate results, in that Americans still very much believe in a ‘dark ages,’ but also some surprises…”
the grammar is a little confusing, but i think he means to say that there’s an online contingent of “tech bro” (make of that what you will) that believe strongly in the narrative that there was a Dark Ages era that was pretty much unremittingly negative.
I have personally seen the kind of committed belief in a European Dark Age that entails an uncritical presumption of negative impact of religion and superficial appreciation of science and rationality. But I would think anything to do with sexual mores one way or the other is the odd one out in that list
Like sure, there are LGBTQ+ people that express a performative disdain for heterosexuality in a manner that might not be ironic, but I don’t see how that would intersect with this particular historical topic in a consistent fashion.
Those who denigrate the “Dark Ages” often portray Christian sexual repression as one of the negative features of the time.
“traditional values” is a very loaded way to initially refer to something that is later described as repression.
That being said, one can probably put that down in similar terms to thinking of the Dark Age as an intellectually repressed time; a caricature undermined by actual research that finds that a “traditional” value really only dates back to a hundred years or so.
Depends on what is it in particular that you think “dates back to a hundred years or so”. It certainly appears to be true that attitudes towards many sexual proclivities were looser in Medieval Europe than what is commonly projected backwards nowadays, as noted on a blog by Dr. Eleanor Janega, for one thing. (Warning: the writing style there can be charitably described as “informal” and less charitably as “Twitter brainrot”.)
https://going-medieval.com/2024/08/21/on-body-count/
On the other hand, being more acceptable than in the caricature still does not mean “similar to today”. In some respects, it was actually looser, especially in the early Medieval (Church-affiliated brothels were already mentioned, with the “Winchester geese” a notable example) but then (as another entry by Dr. Janega makes clear) every single kind of non-reproductive sex was defined as “sodomy”, and at least carried the expectation of a penance if found out, in stark contrast to today.
Moreover – and here is a point I’ll concede to the “Bright Ages crowd” – it appears things actually went backwards (from the present-day perspective) in some respects during the Early Modern/Enlightenment, at least in some regions. The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century is a notable book based on the diary of Franz Schmidt, a Nuremberg executioner who ended the lives of 361 people over the 45 years of his service. A substantial fraction of those were women convicted of infanticide – which did not start to become a capital crime across Europe until “The Council of Florence decreed in 1439 that the souls of children who died without having been baptized descend to hell” (Obladen, 2021) – at the very cusp of commonly accepted Medieval/Early Modern transition.
In Nuremberg, they were initially getting burned at stake, but by Schmidt’s time, drowning in a sack was considered more practical – and he eventually successfully lobbied to make things easier for himself and limit to a “mere” beheading. He’s only burned at stake two people in his career; the second was a counterfeiter and his final execution – the one he “botched”, as the crowds didn’t actually want to hear a man scream as he burnt alive, and everyone understood he was supposed to subtly strangle the counterfeiter as he tied him to a stake, but he was too old to do it right. There was even a small satchel of gunpowder placed around the neck, which was meant to explode and break it, but it was apparently too damp.
The first person burnt at stake, though, was a homosexual. It was also not the only execution for this reason: the book recounts a tale of a gardener who was caught with another man behind the hedge, taken to Schmidt to be tortured and confessed to other dalliances, such as with the guard at the gate of another city. Once that was done, he was executed by disemboweling. Another story was of a woman who slept with both a man her age and his son: as I recall (I borrowed the book from a library years ago), the men received corporate punishment but she a capital one. (Which Schmidt was disturbed by, ultimately noting in the diary that the men may not have known about “incest-by-proxy”, but she definitely must have, and so deserves greater punishment.)
To be fair, some of these things might have only been true to the 16-17th century Germany: after all, it was already an outlier in terms of being the absolute epicentre of witch burnings. (Executions for infanticide appear to have been widespread in that period, however, almost wholly unlike the periods both before and after.) However, I think it clearly forces to move the timeline for “traditional values” in question back to the past 500 years or so.
I think I haven’t yet seen a site like that, but I think all of it makes perfect sense?
– In general, humans try to figure things out and to improve their life (both individually and collectively), hence overall there is such a thing as development and progress, and it makes exceptions to that trend (Bronze Age Collapse, post-Principate “unimpressive ages(s)”) interesting. It also makes the Industrial Revolution, where progress became markedly faster, interesting with a positive valence.
– E.g. monumental urbanism, even if it doesn’t directly improve life, implies large-volume trade, specialization, and a large area of peace in the interior of the empire, which do improve life.
– Religions that are highly open to syncretism don’t pose an extraordinary problem on the level of society. (Modern “woo” falls into the same bucket. If a farmer in an arid area chooses not to build irrigation, instead sacrifices to Persephone for more groundwater, they will find it doesn’t work, but they don’t prevent others from inventing or installing better irrigation.) However, religions that focus on orthodoxy do pose an unusual problem. Where they write down and make authoritative their societies’ current best guess as to how something in the world works, on the one hand they lose their natural ability to learn and improve beyond that view, and on the other hand they tend to become roadblocks — with all the social power they have — to any member of what they decide is their rightful congregation finding and/or disseminating better ideas about how the world works. Perhaps “religion” isn’t the correct term here; the well-analyzed modern cases of ideological states suffer from the same problem (unless of course someone picks the hilarious solution of classifying e.g. the USSR as a theocracy).
– Sexual mores are largely practical solutions to the problem space presented by a given subsistence system. Premodern dense (“plow”) agricultural societies converged onto a small set of broadly similar solutions because those are the ones that work within those constraints. (They did not converge onto a unique solution, though!) It is quite well analyzed that other subsistence systems, e.g. “hoe agriculture”, lead to different family structures being adaptive. Now then: progress in agriculture, trade, industry, etc. have blown up the constraints of the subsistence system (and, ahem, research into human physiology has had certain highly relevant fruits, too). It is only fitting that many people regard the traditional mores as functionally obsolete — as a harmless hobby for those who choose it, but not something normative. It is an odd element on this list inasmuch as theoretically there ought to exist a small set of possible “correct answers” to family structure given the current constraints, but evidently they aren’t quite known and the topic isn’t much discussed.
“– Sexual mores are largely practical solutions to the problem space presented by a given subsistence system.”
We know essentially nothing about subsistence-class sexual practices before the modern era, and surprisingly little from before the 19th Century. We can assume that there were some broadly common practices but we cannot assume that they were adaptive to anything other than the need to avoid being moved from ingroup to outgroup. The sources we have for peasant sexuality in the Middle Ages for instance are a) elite and b) utterly ludicrous.
Perhaps we understood the discussion to be at different levels of granularity? I’m thinking of it on a level like this (with slight reductio ad absurdum; there would be a spectrum of intermediate positions between them):
– In a situation where population density is limited by a factor other than the availability of food (e.g. diseases), it is possible for a single mother to get enough food to maintain herself and raise her children, therefore she wouldn’t care much about the potential partners investing material resources (as opposed to social resources). There is no particular reason for long-term monogamy to be common.
– In a situation where population density is basically limited by food availability (malnutrition-related mortality isn’t strictly limited to starving to death, diseases still play a role) and an extra pair of hands can increase the yearly food supply by nearly enough to maintain itself (e.g. by decreasing harvest spoilage), a mother absolutely needs a husband to successfully raise children. However, teens of both sexes are …tolerated for a comparatively long time in the parental household, because they almost feed themselves. The interesting thing to look for in a spouse is largely their ability to work, and in any case the ability to work is too valuable to consider sacrificing for signaling reasons.
– If the population density is limited by food availability, and the marginal person increases it by very little (and the magic boxes spitting out constant streams of food are controlled by families of men, for the usual reasons), parents of daughters compete to be able to marry their into a family with more rather than less land. Beyond the obvious of bundling her with material resources, they want her movement to the new house to happen as early as feasible, they sacrifice her (in this subsistence system, low-value) ability to do certain kinds of tasks independently to create proof she won’t leave the house on her own, and should the worst happen whereby she would lose any hope of being married to a good party, the parents would sacrifice all the rest of her to improve the chances of the rest of the family’s daughters.
– Moving beyond humans to chimps: if one of the major causes of infant mortality is infanticide (by some male(s) not the parent), paternity uncertainty can be protective for the kid and thus deliberately sought out by the mother.
Some of these considerations go beyond family structure; they also influence plausible wargoals. For instance, “capture slaves” can only make sense in the second, not in the first or third.
That’s much too pessimistic, to say that we know little before the 19th century. Parish registers in England and Scandinavia are comprehensive enough to yield reliable portraits of non-elite practices concerning marriage, pre-marital sex, illegitimacy etc. over the past 400 years (though admittedly not the medieval period).
a mother absolutely needs a husband to successfully raise children.
There are definitely societies where women typically need to depend on a *male* to raise children, but that male doesn’t necessarily have to be her husband. It can be, for example, her brother instead, there are definitely societies where “maternal uncle” is the go-to person for parental care rather than (or sometimes as a heavy supplement to) the father.
One society where parental care tended to be provided by the maternal uncle, rather than the father, is the Nayars of South India. It makes sense in a way- after all, in an age before paternity testing you can never be *sure* than your wife’s children are your kin, whereas you can always know for sure that your sister’s children are your kin. The Nayars seem not to have cared about monogamy, in principle, unmarried and married women and men were both free to take multiple sexual partners (within their caste group) as they choose.
They did care very strongly though about sex with someone *outside of your caste/ethnic community*, which was considered a horrible moral transgression punishable by enslavement.
I think that’s a fascinating example of how much sexual morality can differ even within premodern agricultural contexts. A society like that doesn’t really fit into the contemporary western spectrum of ‘liberal/liberated’ versus ‘traditional Christian morality’. They clearly had a strong sense of sexual purity and propriety, it’s just that it was centered around maintaining the boundaries of the community rather than around monogamy.
Hmm, that reminds me of the claim that both Himalayan polyandry and the Medieval European practice of sending surplus sons to monasteries developed as a way to prevent inheritance fragmenting land leading to unviably small farms.
However, as I am but a layman; it could be that, unaware to me, was outdated/bad history/bad anthropology.
I’ve found that few scientists object to the idea of religion. Many scientists are deeply religious–Robert Bakker, a major name in paleontology, is an Evangelical preacher, and more than you’d think are Wiccan or Neopagan.
The folks I’ve seen use “religion” as a pejorative have mostly been of the “I F’ing Love Science!” ilk–people who treat science as a series of disjointed trivia. I’ve only known a few really die-hard anti-religious scientists, and most were, to be brutally honest, very, very bad scientists.
I’m no fan of the Church, but I’ve also done some studying of Medieval monasticism (I’m working on a hand-made English version of the Rule of St Benedict), and again, to be brutally honest, the Church is one of the greatest beneficiaries of Western civilization. They preserved a tremendous amount of information from the past. They burned and destroyed a tremendous amount as well; the issue of whether heathen writing should be preserved was the subject of lively debate, and they did kill the guy who created the university system. But they also were the ONLY mass of literate people–this is why “clerk” and “cleric” are so similar–and they had some of the only libraries, some of the only medical knowledge, and actively engaged in serious intellectual debate of astonishing depth and breadth.
Which, I think, is why good scientists tend to have a fairly complicated view of religion. This issue is extremely complicated, one in which I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to fully understand everything involved. Anyone who has a simple view of the matter has an overly simplistic view, one which contains as many false ideas as true ones.
As for sex, it’s worth noting a few facts. Testicle size in apes (compared to body size) is correlated with infidelity–monogamous apes have tiny testicles, whereas promiscuous ones have huge testicles compared to body size. Humans are middle of the road, strongly implying that we sleep around but in a limited manner. Second, in the modern era blood typing in schools had to be halted because what should have been a fun science experiment demonstrating a mildly interesting principle ended up destroying families. In the past the whole reason the Church got involved in marriage was to record it because pre-literate methods led to a tremendous amount of confusion (it wasn’t a sacrament for a while, and wasn’t conducted within churches routinely; the Church limited its role to blessing the union, and they’d bless anything). Priesthood in the Middle Ages sometimes ran in families. Finally, it’s worth remembering that the Church owned and operated brothels, and armies were considered merciful for only being a little rape-inclined, rather than using it as a weapon of mass terror.
“Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages” is a good secondary source for this. “The Medieval Reader” is as well (with some…interesting….interpretations of some of the primary sources; Claude Frollo doesn’t even come close to what we have historical records for).
What we consider “traditional values” in this regard is pretty much pure myth. The reality is far more complicated, and often far more brutal. Again, anyone peddling a simple answer is peddling a simplistic answer, one that obfuscates as much as it reveals. These are INCREDIBLY complicated topics, and INCREDIBLY emotionally charged ones. It’s extremely difficult to examine them objectively.
“blood typing destroyed families” is probably more an indication of widespread ignorance of how heredity works than evidence of a lot of pregnancy due to infidelity, mind.
Like, blood type is one of the most common traits that can differ between immediate family members as a result of genetic combinations. It’s so common that there’s a whole medical condition in which women having incompatible blood types with their unborn children presents a medical risk to the foetus.
Incidentally, this is why the pivotal twist of A Game of Thrones is actually rather funny, because it turns out that Jon Arryn was right for the wrong reasons. From a modern stand point, the thing to take from the fact that there have been repeated examples of Baratheon-Lannister marriages in the past isn’t that the dark hair always wins out; it’s that there are a lot of Baratheons who would carry the allele for blonde hair, which could then find itself expressed if one had children with yet another blonde. Doing that three times in a row is unlikely, but not totally impossible.
The odds that it would happen three times in one marriage and then never in Robert’s impressively large array of bastards Jon tracked down are so remote I think we can be confident in saying Robert has two black hair alleles
“Many scientists are deeply religious–Robert Bakker, a major name in paleontology, is an Evangelical preacher, and more than you’d think are Wiccan or Neopagan.”
in my experience most people in the sciences, whatever their religious views, keep them strictly private and under wraps as much as possible (for obvious reasons), so it’s often hard to know what they are. I’d be fascinated to meet or even just learn about people in the sciences who are Neopagan (or for that matter paleo-pagan), though.
In all seriousness, what are the ‘obvious reasons’?
I work in chemistry research where everyone has a PhD. I’ve known plenty of people who are actively religious* and are happy to mention/talk about it in conversation.
*By this I mean at minimum attend a weekly service, not that they’re trying to recruit. They’re mostly Christian or Muslim, which reflects UK demographics
“In all seriousness, what are the ‘obvious reasons’?”
I think people in the life sciences might be less willing to openly share their religious views, because they don’t want to be mistaken for a creationist or an evolution denier / skeptic.
“in my experience most people in the sciences, whatever their religious views, keep them strictly private and under wraps as much as possible (for obvious reasons)…”
This attempts to equate how publicly one declares one’s religion to how devout one is–a correlation that is not obvious, and which is specifically said to be wrong according to one of the largest religious groups in the world (though it’s often ignored; I got a lot of amusement pointing out that Jesus’ statements in the Bible specifically site what happens on Ash Wednesday as wrong). I haven’t found such a correlation to exist, to be blunt. Some of the most devout people I’ve known have also been the ones to keep religion the most private. The view was that some things you don’t show the public. It’s like money–any idiot can flash cash around, but people who care about money (not always the same as “rich people”) tend not to show it off as much.
Further, scientists tend to want to be known as scientists in areas where that matters. Bakker never, in my experience, used religious reasoning in his scientific arguments–he’s wrong for a bunch of other reasons (his notion of disease causing the K/Pg extinction is just stupid, though to be fair he didn’t push it very hard), but as a scientist he’s wrong for scientific reasons. I once saw a Creationist give a talk about downstream sedimentology after dam removal, and it was a sound scientific talk–not spectacular, but good, solid sedimentology, and the other sedimentologists treated it as such. So if you’re learning about their lives as scientists, you will obviously not encounter much regarding their religion–just as you don’t encounter much about their tastes in art, whether they’re married or not, if they favor free trade or tarifs, or if they get seasick.
“I’d be fascinated to meet or even just learn about people in the sciences who are Neopagan (or for that matter paleo-pagan), though.”
Why? It’s no different than meeting or learning about Christians in the sciences, or a Medieval Re-enactor in the sciences. That logic and belief in the supernatural are not mutually exclusive is evidenced by Greece, Rome, and the monasteries of the Middle Ages (most if not all of which engaged in practices we’d consider magic, some of which engaged in alchemy, a practice THEY considered magic).
The ones I’ve known haven’t let it impact their work much. Sometimes it drives them to study certain things, or to avoid certain things, but I’ve seen people driven to and away from paleontology due to smell (maceration is quite odiferous). For my part, I can think of far worse religions for a geologist or biologist, for example–worshiping the Earth as a goddess by studying Her makes a lot of sense.
Jesus (i.e., the protagonist of the Gospels, the only Jesus we can know by historical inquiry) said a lot of things, including, “Everyone who acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge before my father in Heaven” (so proclaim your faith openly) and “When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your father in secret” (a different message). One man’s contradiction is another man’s higher synthesis.
I should add that in the US context, at least, scientists being much less religious than the general population had been rather well-established for over a century.
https://www.nature.com/articles/28478
> The question of religious belief among US scientists has been debated since early in the century. Our latest survey finds that, among the top natural scientists, disbelief is greater than ever — almost total.
> Research on this topic began with the eminent US psychologist James H. Leuba and his landmark survey of 1914. He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 “greater” scientists within his sample1. Leuba repeated his survey in somewhat different form 20 years later, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively
> In 1996, we repeated Leuba’s 1914 survey and reported our results in Nature. We found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. This year, we closely imitated the second phase of Leuba’s 1914 survey to gauge belief among “greater” scientists, and find the rate of belief lower than ever — a mere 7% of respondents.
> Leuba attributed the higher level of disbelief and doubt among “greater” scientists to their “superior knowledge, understanding, and experience”2. Similarly, Oxford University scientist Peter Atkins commented on our 1996 survey, “You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don’t think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge.” Such comments led us to repeat the second phase of Leuba’s study for an up-to-date comparison of the religious beliefs of “greater” and “lesser” scientists.
> Our chosen group of “greater” scientists were members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Our survey found near universal rejection of the transcendent by NAS natural scientists. Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality). Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality).
On the other hand (to follow up my previous comment) things appear to get a bit more complicated worldwide. A decade ago, there actually was a survey of 9,422 biologists and physicists from France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Taiwan, Turkiye, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023116664353
It’s probably not very surprising that it generally found fewer scientists in those fields to be at least “slightly” religious than the general population in most of those countries, but relative proportions is where it gets interesting. In the UK and the US, a very similar fraction of the respondents – 27% and 30% – are “slightly, moderately or very religious” – even though UK as a whole is 47% religious vs. ~1.5X number in the US. Yet, while French population is about as (ir)religious as the British, at 46%, French scientists are half as religious as the British ones, at 16%.
Now, India, Turkiye and Italy all have over half the respondents (59%, 57% and 52%) describing themselves as religious – but this is in societies where 77%-85% of the general population also describe themselves that way. On the other hand, Taiwan has 54% of the scientists when the general population is at 44%. This is even more drastic in Hong Kong – the general population is at 20%, but the scientists at 39%. Hong Kong and Taiwan are also the only places where a greater fraction of scientists attend weekly services than the general population (although the fractions are small for both) and where “a higher proportion of scientists identified with religion as a child [16 y.o] than currently identify with a religious tradition”. According to the authors, “it is possible that the pattern seen in Hong Kong and Taiwan is as a result of religious investment in primary and secondary educational structures that provide religious socialization for the wealthy in addition to enabling the pursuit of higher education and careers in science.”
Funnily enough, I happened to see a fictional representation of what the latter looks like fairly recently in The Last Dance, last year’s Hong Kong film which is about a former wedding planner losing his agency due to Covid and switching to running a funeral agency instead. The main character is completely secular but the co-owner is a Taoist priest who does the titular “Last Dance” ritual at the funerals and practically the only one at all these agencies who still fully believes in his religion, rather than merely when it is convenient. The film (which I loved) is definitely a product of Hong Kong’s society, and so it ultimately sees little value in any religion besides the instrumental. Yet in the meantime, it enjoys confronting us with dilemmas at the intersection of tradition and modernity – none the more so concerning priest’s children, as his daughter is much more committed to Taoism than the son – yet Taoism does not ordain women because “menstruation is unclean”, so the son is the successor, even though for him it is simply a day job. In a pivotal moment, the son is revealed to have undergone baptism in secret from the rest of the family – purely so that his own son could have a better chance of getting accepted in the prestigious Catholic school.
In the film it fails (and also renders the priest bedridden and dependent on the daughter as he suffers a severe stroke after finding out the truth) – but it’s easy to see how the successful instances of such would have led to the statistics in that poll. Then, these adult conversions would have also resulted in stronger-held beliefs. The best representation of that (since the aforementioned numbers cover any belief, even weakly held) appears to be the fraction of respondents who say “I know God (gods for polytheist faiths) exists, no doubts” – and there, Hong Kong (17%) and Taiwan (20%) are ahead not just of France (5%) or the UK/US (9-10%), but even Italy (16%) and not far behind India (26%) – but far behind Turkiye at 61%.
To be fair, one thing which makes direct comparisons somewhat difficult is the inclusion of scientists who work in those countries, but have been born elsewhere – as that fraction varies massively between the countries sampled, from single digits (India, Taiwan, Turkiye) to 13% (Italy) to 26% (France) to 42-45% (US/UK) to over half (HK, although much of that is likely the rest of PRC). Nevertheless, a couple more somewhat surprising observations.
* In most countries, the fraction of those respondents who are religious and lack doubts is practically the same as of those who also attend services weekly. Turkiye is the major exception, with 33% attending vs. 61% not doubting. India, meanwhile, is the only place where the fraction of respondents who are “praying once a day or more” (48%) far exceeds that of weekly attendants and those who lack doubts (both at 26%). Impact of polytheism, perhaps?
* Turkiye also leads with the fraction of female respondents (40%), but not by much (Italy and the UK are at 38%), and Hong Kong had the lowest fraction at 26%. However, the self-selecting nature of the survey, whose response rate hovered between 39% and 57% suggests we probably should exercise caution here, even if the sample sizes were all quite large.
* In every single country, the majority of respondents were “Currently married or living as married”, ranging from 56% in Hong Kong to 80% in France.
* France was the ONLY place where over half of respondents (55%) reported having two or more children. Everywhere else, that fraction was at 24-35%. As noted above, France also has by far the least religious respondents according to every single metric used in the survey. This appears to make biologists and physicists an outlier from the frequently observed truism that the religious families have more children.
* Scientists from every country were asked to pick an option to describe their understanding of science and religion. “Independence” was the most popular option (44%-62%) and collaboration usually the one after (7% in France to 33% in Turkiye.) India and Turkiye were the only places where ANY scientists responded with “Conflict; I consider myself to be on the side of religion” – and even that, that was 1% and 2%. For the opposite, “Conflict: Side of science”, the fraction goes from 9% (Taiwan) to 35% (the UK). (Notably, Turkiye is at 24% here.)
* In most countries, around 20% of respondents affirm “Science has made me much less religious” (the US leads with 22%.) The main exceptions are once again, Hong Kong (12%) and Taiwan (6%).
Based on anecdotes, from personal experience to Tim O’Neill’s blog History for Atheists, I also have the vague suspicion that ‘really die-hard anti-religious’ people also make poor historians.
Though, naturally it is possible that those ‘Jesus did not exist and actually was Horus and atheists who disagree with that must be secretly Christians’-style atheists on the internet are not representative.
You catch a very different crowd to the people I tend to find are most firmly committed to the “dark ages” thing then. My experience has been that it’s deeply entwined with a right-wing coded adoration of the Roman Empire as some pillar of “traditional masculinity” and glorification of its wars and conquests. They tend to see the post-Roman Early Medieval period as one built by roving barbarian invaders (often none-too-subtly analogised to modern debates around immigration) and the High Medieval period as nothing more than an outgrowth of that that they assume contained no human accomplishment whatsoever. These types tend to regard the medieval period as something of an aberration at best, before “the west” dusted itself off in the renaissance and began aping the Romans again.
Yeah this is my experience as well. Though I have seen some things linked to the whole anti-religion SCIENCE F YEAH stuff, it seems mostly to be peddled by the bottom of the barrel accounts that regurgitate fascist-adjacent ‘hard men->good times->soft men->hard times’ memes.
I find the hard-line anti-religious stuff seems to hone in more on modern fundamental creationism in its messaging.
Meh, there’s plenty of “dark ages-ism” with a leftist valence. It’s sort of like anti-vaxxerdom. For some examples, see the first couple examples here: https://historyforatheists.com/2024/09/the-great-myths-15-what-about-the-dark-ages/
Setting my (dim) opinion of the analogy aside: it’s amusing to note that while the political stance of the first few memes is clear, reading it all the way to the end also brings up the opposite.
> All this new-fangled nonsense about the Medieval Period not being so “dark” is dismissed as revisionist nonsense and, recently, as probably politically motivated and “woke”.
> …This is why value-judgement based terms like “the Dark Ages” are not useful. Even if we leave aside the heavy historiographical baggage and associations that weigh down the term, it is hardly neutral terminology. This is why neutral terms like “the Early Middle Ages” are better and so are generally more accepted by current historians. This is not them being revisionist, apologetic or “woke”. It is simply them doing their job with objectivity.
Now, that author (Tim O’Neill) doesn’t cite explicit examples here, but I would suspect here he is referring more to the European and especially British context, where the Anti-Theist Right is incomparably more prominent than it is in the US (not that it’s completely absent in the US, mind you – see Peter Boghossian, for starters). With >50% of the general population and the majority of white Britons atheist, describing any defence of medieval Christianity as “woke” makes far more sense in the UK context than the American one. (Or the Australian one for that matter – while the author is an Australian like me and we are markedly less religious than the US, with a 44%-39% split between Christianity and irreligion vs. 63%/29% in the USA, with the rest in low single digits in both, the right-wing parties here are still a lot more publicly aligned with Christianity than in the UK – i.e. witness the occasional attempts to force pro-life votes in Australian state Parliaments, which would be completely unthinkable anywhere in the UK outside Northern Ireland.)
Having said all that…the author of that blog has “a Bachelors Degree with Honours in English and History and a research Masters Degree from the University of Tasmania, with a specialisation in historicist analysis of medieval literature.” In his own view, that’s not enough to classify him as a historian (“At least, not in anything but the broadest sense of the word.”) Hence, when his conclusions and those of Dr. Devereaux diverge, we should clearly be inclined towards our host on most subjects (with medieval literature presumably the main exception.) This MATTERS because I don’t think his defence of the Early Medieval specifically is at all credible in the light of the evidence already presented on here years ago. This is his argument in full:
> Unsurprisingly, those who want to preserve the idea of “the Dark Ages” – at least for the earlier part of the Middle Ages – hold up the Catastrophists as wholly correct. In the decades since Ward-Perkins’ book was published, however, historians have (as they often do) come to a more nuanced consensus. Whether the Fall of Rome was mainly a catastrophe or mostly a continuity, most would argue today, depends on when, where and what you are talking about.
> As some of Ward-Perkins’ critics noted at the time, many of his examples come from the fringes of the Empire, where Roman civilisation was an imported business mostly propped up by the infrastructure and economics of the military and the taxation systems. As Western Roman politics consumed itself with civil wars and usurpers in the fifth century, people on the edges of the system were forced to (and, seemingly, also chose to) become more self-reliant and local in their thinking and action. So while there are good examples of chaos from, say, Roman Britian [sic] or western Spain, there are localised continuities and transformations there too. Closer to the centre we find more transformation and continuity, punctuated by periods of chaos and collapse. So, it depends.
> It also depends on what we choose to focus on and value. The original, traditional Catastrophist Thesis of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was framed by men who saw strong monarchical rule, centralised authority, an empire that traded the Pax Romana for riches and tribute, a centralised taxation system, a large and expensive standing army, large public works of great extravagance, and an economy with a few very rich people at the top and masses of poor or unfree people at the base as normal, proper and good. Therefore, for them, the breakdown and collapse of all these things was, therefore, automatically bad. These were the things, they believed, that made civilisation civilised. Their fall was, therefore, automatically a terrible tragedy.
> Many people today would question most if not all of these assumptions, at least to some extent. If we do value those things and concentrate on them, the Catastrophists and the “Dark Ages” defenders who rely on them may seem to have a point. But what if we focus on other things? A comparison between a third century Gallo-Roman peasant and his seventh century Merovingian descendant that concentrates on things other than mosaics, roofing materials and whether or not there was an amphitheatre in the nearest city but, rather, notes other differences may arrive at a different view. The third century Gaul was paying substantial taxes – up to a third of his yearly income – and this was brutally enforced by officials who often needed to be placated with gifts and bribes. And while these taxes substantially went to paying the Roman Army, that army was in this period regularly at war with itself, while foreigners were taking advantage of this by raiding over the frontiers deep into Roman territory. Our Gallo-Roman was not getting much of a return on his tax. His Merovingian descendant, on the other hand, paid no taxes to anyone. It would be some time before the bureaucracy or infrastructure for that kind of thing would develop again in what was becoming France. Frankish nobles and their neighbours occasionally fought small scale wars, but it would be rare for our peasant to be affected by those. His home may have been thatched rather than tiled, but he appears by many measures to be better off than his ancestor. There is even some evidence that average height increased in the Early Medieval Period, before declining in later centuries (see Richard H. Steckel, “New Light on the ‘Dark Ages’: The Remarkably Tall Stature of Northern European Men during the Medieval Era”, Social Science History, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2004, pp. 211-229).
> So this was a “Dark Age” for who, exactly? Or what are we choosing to highlight when we make this assessment? What we decide regarding what was “dark” or “light” depends on what we choose to assign value or where we choose to focus. And this is the problem with this whole terminology. It is value-laden and based on selective focus and judgement. Someone who values proto-science over theology will regard the Early Medieval Period as a barren wasteland. But those who regard highly abstract and intricately-patterned art will see it as a period of remarkable examples of beauty and innovation. It all depends on where you look and how you focus.
Now, compare the above, written by one whose core expertise is in medieval literature (note that the only material reference, for the supposedly increased height in the Early Medieval, is over 20 years old), to what the friendly neighbourhood material history specialist tells us.
https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/
> Instead, to jump to the end, what the evidence – again, here mostly archaeological evidence used in a statistics-driven way – suggests is that what we are seeing is that average, per-capita production declined, resulting in a real decline in living standards including nutrition, which resulted in population decline. That population decline was thus the physical expression of a lot of real misery: starvation perhaps, but in most cases more likely heightened infant and maternal mortality as a result of malnourishment. This is, by the by, an example of a simple Malthusian interaction breaking, because the classic Malthusian logic assumes that agricultural production is primarily a function of land – but as it turns out, a lot about how you farm that land, even without major changes in farming technology, can substantially change the efficiency of your agricultural economy and thus the population it could support. In essence, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire caused the carrying capacity of the Mediterranean World, and especially western Europe, to decline, leading to the population declining to follow in step – which is to be clear, an incredibly bloodless way to describe a period of real, sharp human misery.
> …Jongman presents graphs, for instance, of animal bone deposits, a good indication of the degree to which people were eating meat in a society. Meat is, of course, very high in protein (and also delicious) but it is also expensive – you can feed a lot more people on grain than meat, so the level of meat consumption in a pre-modern society is a good indicator of living standards (especially meat consumption among non-elites). In Italy, Jongman notes, animal bone assemblages become progressively more common from 450 BC until reaching a peak around 50 AD. They then decline a bit (but still well elevated from the pre-Roman norm) to a low in the mid-third century (which you will recall was not a great time for the Roman Empire) before rising again to another peak in the fourth and early fifth century, high but lower than the early imperial peak, before collapsing to almost nothing by 650 AD; the decline from 450 AD to 550 AD is the sharpest change in the data at any point. The data for the provinces also fits expectations – in that graph, assemblages sharply rise beginning in 150 BC, peak in 150 AD, fall down to a lower-but-still-high plateau in the fourth century, and then collapse down to nearly pre-Roman levels by 450.
> If anything, this may understate the problem because the animals here are not all the same either. As Bryan Ward-Perkins notes (op cit), based on archaeological remains, the average height of an iron-age (pre-Roman) cow was 115.5cm. In the Roman period, this rises to 120cm, but in the early Middle Ages, collapses down to 112cm. Now that is of course both bad for the people eating the cows, but it is also bad for what it says about the farmers raising the cows – chances are you are shortchanging the nutrition of your (very valuable) cows because you yourself are experiencing significant food shortfalls. The cows are getting smaller because this society is getting poorer – and not merely the elites are getting poorer; everyone is getting poorer. At this point the evidence is fairly clear on this point: living standards declines across the entire spectrum of Late Roman and early medieval society. Not only were the elites of 600 AD poorer than the elites of 400 AD (and much poorer than the elites of 200AD), so too were the peasants.
> …it seems fairly clear from the evidence that the collapse of Roman connectedness took a slow economic decline and turned it into a collapse. As I’ve said, what you see here depends on where you look and what you think is the most important; for me – as I’ve noted before – my focus is drawn to the living conditions of the people in a society. From that perspective, the fall of Rome was an unmitigated disaster, a clear (but not total) break with the economic patterns of antiquity which had enabled a measure of prosperity in the Mediterranean world. The world that emerged in the sixth century was one that was substantially poorer, its population brought back in line with its reduced production by decades of grinding misery and shortage.
Dr. Devereaux concludes in that post that on average, Medieval European societies only began to exceed the (late) Roman standard of living after 1100. While he acknowledges SOME new things did get developed in the intervening ~600 years, on the whole, I don’t think it’s particularly unfair or indefensible to describe roughly 500 AD-1,000 AD (but not >1,100 AD) as “The Dark Ages” in the light of this evidence – let alone the even narrower 476-800 period. (Although I think choosing the formation of Carolingian Empire as a watershed over patterns in material conditions on the ground is more of “elite history” thinking we should be moving away from.) And it’s definitely FAR more defensible than, say, thinking The French Revolution took part in the Middle Ages, as 22% of the Americans apparently do. I would even argue that calling the same period “Late Antiquity” whitewashes all of this damage to a much greater extent than calling it “The Dark Ages” sensationalizes it.
P.S. The other argument of Tim O’Neill, which is not directly relevant to the poll above, but IS relevant to arguments over the role of Christianity, is that the Early Medieval period was also where the Church was at its weakest across the Medieval, so describing it as The Dark Ages directly contradicts the “hard” anti-theist argument. I’ll note that while true on its surface, it does not reckon with the role of Christianity in precipitating the downfall in the first place.
While much of the Gibbonian thesis ranges from dubious at best to obviously false and “Fremenish” at worst (i.e. that “the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister”;”a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity”), even “Decline and Fall” Collections here acknowledge that a big (though certainly not the only) reason why the “barbarians” who brought down Rome were not successfully integrated like the peripheral people earlier in Roman history was because the centralized Roman church treated them as heretics. (And the Byzantine lost its Arab lands to the Rashidun for the same reason.)
I cited O’Neill purely for his display of several “Dark Ages” memes with a leftist valence. I don’t have the expertise to engage with Devereux or O’Neill or Perry and Gabriele (“The Bright Ages”) on the quality of European life between 476 and 1000, and if I did, I wouldn’t choose blog comments as the place to do it. OTOH, sadly, I’m familiar with various of the swamps that litter the internet, and equipped to dispute with evidence the false claim that “Dark Ages-ism” is a distinctly right wing meme.
Thanks for the link to the Youtube presentation. I listened, while doing some cooking etc., rather than watched. The discussion particularly at the end was worth it alone. I have shared the link with others.
I had two rats named Marius and Sulla. So sweet, but man, they did not have a braincell between them.
What counts as ancient special forces? I would argue that a special forces unit is “elite light infantry”, however that is conceptualized within a culture. So, Alexander’s Agranian Javelinmen should count.
Though you may also be able to make an argument that modern militaries have institutionalized an ancient practice of forming a force of “picked men” for particularly difficult tasks
Elite infantry (and cavalry) certainly existed in ancient times, but they were generally used for direct fights against the enemy army. And this isn’t what modern special forces do.
William McRaven’s book on special operations states “A special operation is conducted by forces specially trained, equipped, and supported for a specific target whose destruction, elimination, or rescue (in the case of hostages) is a political or military imperative.” And special forces are units that specialize in this. Of course, one can use ordinary troops for special operations as well. But the last thing you want a special operation to do is turn into a regular slugging match with your enemy’s regular army. Planting a bomb and sneaking out before anyone knew they’re there, or landing on the rooftop of an enemy fortification and attacking before the enemy knows they’re there, is more their approach.
The ancient world certainly had cases where leadership was targeted for elimination, but that seems to have been more by assassins operating outside of the regular military. While destroying high value targets generally only makes sense if you have an industrial infrastructure to destroy and explosives to blow it up with.
Ninja may be some of the closest historical counterparts to modern special forces – except they’re early modern, gunpowder era forces themselves. And sources aren’t clear if they set aside for special ninja missions or were regular soldiers who normally fought in the field with the rest of the army, but sometimes got assigned special tasks.
Bret touched on this in the first post in this series, when he pointed out that Adar’s plan is operationally “bonkers”, and that a small strike force – for which we might read special forces – would be better suited to the ostensible strategic goal of killing Sauron.
From what I understand we do occasionally get forces doing “special forces stuff” (trying to sneak into an enemy fortress to open the gates, etc.) but they’re usually assembled ad-hoc, IE: the commander picks out the guys he thinks seem most suited for the task at-site, rather than having a prepared group of sneakers.
I also thought that something like special kidnappers or fort gate openers should count. Although I don’t think it’s formalized anywhere, but I bet that the king use the same people when that kind of task comes up.
The original meaning of “Special Forces” is simply a force that is specialized, i.e. focused on a narrow aspect of warfare. Examples are airborne forces, dedicated mountain / alpine divisions, or amphibious assault forces (marines).
What it explicitly did NOT mean was regular forces, but better. There’s a argument out there that this modern conception is the result of a vicious cycle. The “cult of the special forces” takes prestige and resources away from the regular forces. This makes the regular forces less reliable and commanders rely on special forces for important actions. This further shifts prestige and resources away from the unreliable regular forces to the special forces, which then reinforces the cycle. The argument goes that well-trained, motivated regular infantry can do the majority of what special forces are meant to do and that an army’s overall effectiveness is more reflected by the floor, i.e. how effective their regular forces are, than by how effective any special force is.
When I was a schoolboy “the Dark Ages” was an expression applied only to Britain to cover the period from which virtually no writing had survived to illuminate events – so, from some time shortly after the legions left to about the time, I suppose, of Bede. Still seems fair enough to me. The phrase was not applied to the Continent where the historical outlines we were told about, Catholics vs Arians, Ostrogoths, Franks, Wisigoths and Wandals, Lombards and so forth evidently implied that written records had been compiled and that some had survived.
I think when I was a child I would have understood the Dark Ages as referring to the entire period between the withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain to 1066. As in Michael Wood’s BBC series In Search of the Dark Ages (although I see from wikipedia that also had an episode on Boadicea who is not normally included). The fact that we have somewhat better sources for continental Europe after the fall of the Western Empire was not something I was consciously aware of until recently.
In an American context it’s much more vague, but also there is no national standard for the concept in curricula. “Dark Ages” could run from as early as ‘when Emperors aren’t like Emperors in the movies anymore’ to as late as ‘when they started making up new Latin to give animals science names.’
We were taught in middle school “Social Studies” that the Dark Ages were darkest after the Fall of Rome (i.e. the Rome on the Tiber and Italy), up to Charlemagne. Then came the Middle Ages, which were themselves then, brilliantly lighting up the entire world, superceded by the glorious Renaissance — and the Age of Discovery, meaning US are now in the history narrative.
How many peasants led Republican legions?
Not many. But Plutarchos specifies that Caius Marius´ parents earned their living with their hands.
Besides Marius?
An appreciable number of Roman imperium-havers were homines novi.
Homo novus did not have to mean peasant. We know about Marius´ neighbour Cicero, and his parents were rich landowners – just limited to Arpinum, not doing politics in Rome.
Probably most homines novi were such.
But Rome had a lot of consuls, and few of these have as detailed biographies as Marius and Cicero. Besides Marius, how many Roman consuls were peasants, and who?
Also, it´s pretty sure that peasants did end up leading legions and the whole Empire. Maximinus Thrax and many of the barrackrooms emperors after him, as well as many generals who did not usurp.
Who were the better generals, in the end – the barrackrooms emperors or the republican consuls? Who did the better job selecting and training generals – Republic or Empire?
Saladin, history’s most famous Kurd, turns out to be damned by faint praise.
I often think about how the ethnic composition of the Muslim world during the Crusades gets so frequently homogenized down to “Arabs”. The erasure this entails for Kurds is bad enough, but it also irritates me how often it’s unknown or forgotten that some of the major players were the Seljuk Turks.
Not to mention erasing entirely the Amazigh of North Africa and Iberia.
IOW, Islam = Arab.
Well, the Muslim world during the Crusades was doing exactly the same thing by calling all varieties of European over three centuries “Franks” because the first group they encountered of the first crusade happened to be French.
And the Arabs who conquered north Africa in the 7th century did their best to erase the Amazigh (Berbers) themselves, well before any Europeans got there. Like most colonialists they set themselves up as the ruling class and declared the indigenous languages and culture “barbarian” that should be replaced. The Arab elite, once they gained independence from Ottoman Turk and then French rule, were in no hurry to change this: the Amazigh language couldn’t be used in Algerian schools until 2011 or so.
Do you regard it as a bad thing to have done?
@Isator, I think the first bit where all the inhabitants of the near middle east become “Arabs” and all the inhabitants of Europe become “Franks” is very very human and not particularly bad. History, and current events which are just very recent history, is fractal. There’s always more and more distinctions that could be made, and would be considered important by the people being discussed. But we human beings have limited brains and limited time so we simplify everything.
Sometimes those simplifications do actually cause us to misinterpret, stereotype, or otherwise cause problems, in which case yes it’s a bad thing.
As for the second, the Arabs (and yes they were largely Arab, in the first wave of Ummayad conquests there was a clear social hierarchy in which the leadership positions were reserved for those with ancestry in what is now Arabia) attempting to erase the Amazigh language and culture was bad. Unfortunately it is again very very human.
Was Frank the generic term for all Europeans or just Western Europeans? Like, did they consider Byzantines and Slavs to be Franks as well?
‘Frank’ as a generic ethnonym is associated with the trade language now called Lingua Franca, a pidgin developed by Italian traders for doing business in Provence and Catalonia that was also used to manage non-Italian sailors.
Modern nationalisms confuse things here; immediately post-Charlemagne there’s no hard linguistic frontier anywhere between Bordeaux and Milan, just an accent gradient. French was a language north of that, with a real linguistic frontier running along a rough line from the big estuary on the Atlantic coast over to Switzerland.
Eventually you get what are essentially expat communities from London to Safi to Alexandria to Caffa, with the people there speaking the lingua franca to each other.
‘Romans’ (Greek-speakers) would have been the other main kind of European; certainly some Slavs were sometimes Franks and sometimes Romans.
From “The Crusades Through Arab Eyes” it was at first the generic term for western Europeans taking part in the crusades. Byzantines were “Romans” according to my books. Over time the middle easterners did become a bit more aware of who was who and “Frank” become more associated with people from France.
There is undoubtedly a linguistic basis, as the biggest portion of the 1st crusade army that actually reached the middle east was French, plus any “English” nobles would have spoken the same language. But the Turks and Arabs were already familiar with Norman invaders and nuisances who originally came from France, and knew where the majority of these crusaders came from. (The German contingent had mostly been massacred in Anatolia by the Turks.) So even though nationalism wasn’t a thing, for anyone on the receiving end of the first few crusades “Frank” was a pretty accurate term for “those annoying invaders who aren’t Romans”
Forgot to add, source is primarily “The Crusades Through Arab Eyes” by Amin Maalouf, 1984. A Lebanese writer who evidently didn’t see anything terribly bad about using “Arab” as a shorthand for all the Egyptians, Turks, Arabs, Kurds, etc in the middle east at the time.
That is one really interesting survey about the Middle Ages! I wouldn’t take YouGov as “gospel truth” since I’ve seen some results from them that diverged from other polling firms, and i think of Pew as like the gold standard, but it’s really interesting nonetheless. I was especially interested by the fact that 1) opinion about the Middle Ages isn’t actually polarized by political party, and 2) it is polarized by age, with the 18-29 crowd (i can’t keep track whether they’re Gen Z or Gen Alpha at this point) being more pro medieval than their elders. Which kind of makes sense- the Middle Ages *shouldn’t* be a partisan issue, since medieval mores and ways of life don’t actually line up very well with either Republican or Democratic ideologies, and both sides might find some things they admire and other things they deplore.
America of course is so deeply rooted, as a country, in the Enlightenment and in the era of early modern colonialism that maybe it’s unsuprising most Americans have a dim view of the Middle Ages. I kind of wonder what results you would get if you took a similar survey in, like, Denmark or Slovakia or Hungary, or even in England.
> America of course is so deeply rooted, as a country, in the Enlightenment and in the era of early modern colonialism that maybe it’s unsurprising most Americans have a dim view of the Middle Ages
Funny thing is, one of the aspects which had immediately jumped out at me when I looked at the full poll results with crosstabs was that only 13% of women (vs. 22% for men) and 14% of Trump 2024 voters reported “very favorable” opinion of the Enlightenment. To be fair, the same fraction for Harris 2024 voters was 24% – markedly higher, but not overwhelmingly so, and both groups were at 38% “somewhat favorable”. The other major difference was that 37% of T2024 block responded with “Didn’t Know” to the question vs. 28% for H2024 block. The percentages of those reporting somewhat and very unfavorable opinions on the Enlightenment are actually practically the same – 11% for T2024 and 10% for H2024. (Women had both lower favorable and lower unfavorable numbers due to a much larger “don’t know” fraction – 43% vs. 29%.)
H2024 actually had a larger fraction with very unfavorable opinions (3% vs. 1%), but that might be connected to one very consistent trendline in that poll – some 6-12% of Black respondents (a total of 294) responded “very unfavorably” towards practically everything they were asked about, be it their opinion on historical periods like Enlightenment/Late Antiquity/Classical Antiquity (8%), to every figure in the poll*, like Joan of Arc or Marco Polo or Hildegard of Bingen (6%) let alone Lionheart and Charlemagne (10% and 11%) – in all of those cases, “very unfavorables” from White, Hispanic and Other respondents were at 0-3%. This might also explain why 18-29 and 30-44 cohorts had larger unfavorable attitudes towards the Enlightenment (12%) vs. the 45-64 and 65+ () yet also higher “very favorable” (22% vs. 14-15%.)
*Saladin also had 7% “very unfavourable” from Black respondents – though, in this case, total “unfavourable” were similar across all four groups (11%-18%) and White respondents had the highest “Don’t Know” (though it was in the 60s for every group) and the lowest “very + somewhat favourable” (15% vs. 22%-25% for the other three.)
Anyway, this connects to my apprehension about the way both Dr. Devereaux and the authors of The Bright Ages* bemoan the ongoing prevalence of “The Dark Ages” as a descriptor. After all, YouGov’s question had a remarkable constrained structure – whether “the European Middle Ages” as a period “was a dark age and things were objectively worse in this period than what came before and what came after” (48%) or “It was a complicated, messy period neither better nor worse than any other” (52%). This just seems SO off to me – same as Perry and Gabriele echoing the latter framing with “It’s not good or bad in and of itself, but rather a time filled with horrors and wonders, just like any other period.” If I absolutely HAD to pick between these two options, I would have had to go with the former in spite of knowing much of Medieval was quite clearly superior to the earlier history (particularly the pre-Roman history) for many people – simply because I do not understand how one look at the glib “it was all the same” framing of the latter option and NOT see the erasure of the vast material progress (to go with the most undeniable example; I’m sure Dr. Devereaux and others would also cite the development of moral philosophy, etc. as with one of the earliest posts on here devoted to Cicero) inherent to it.
Said erasure then appears to lead to people who actually DO believe that, contra Gabriele and Perry, said period WAS “some golden age, some period to be emulated.” For perhaps the most succinct example of such a worldview, see here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230126232400/https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-road-to-serfdom/
> The Reactionary Mind is in some way an answer to Russell Kirk’s similarly titled 1953 opus, one of the founding documents of the postwar American right. It is not enough to be merely conservative, says Davis, when there is so little left of the order we should conserve and so much imposed that must be rooted out. We cannot be defenders of the status quo; we must rebel and rebuild.
> This makes the project fundamentally revisionist, intent on rewriting centuries worth of the West’s understanding of itself. Enemies of progress denounced by the modern right must be reevaluated in light of the reactionary worldview. Champions of progress, meanwhile, even those who have called themselves conservative, must be held to account for the destruction they have wrought.
> The argument at the center of the book is that life was just better eight centuries ago; the medieval serf, for all his technological primitiveness, at least had the advantages of an integral social order and an integral worldview. “The major catastrophes in Western history…the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution,” dissolved both and gave us the iPhone as consolation.
> Another of the founding texts of the contemporary “conservative” movement warns that governments might set us on a road to serfdom, reimposing the premodern conditions of the medieval serf on his 20th-generation descendants. Davis is ready to hit the road, to ride back past modern catastrophe to the happy life of our faithful forebears.
> He makes his case with a startling simplicity, recasting modern humanism as anti-humanism, and holding up the modern state in contrast to medieval government—a comparison that reflects none too kindly on our own temporal rulers. What good have these centuries of revolution done, besides strip men of their religion and their land and substitute the iron fist of the liberal state for a free life under a Christian king? Though I must admit I am predisposed to agreement, it is hard not to be struck by just how obvious the book’s lines of reasoning appear.
> Of course the reorganization of society around the individual at the expense of mediating institutions necessarily leads to increased state responsibility, and thus increased state authority. Of course social contract theory legitimizes the expansion of governmental power in a way medieval theory never could. Of course a modern bureaucratic leviathan is both more vulnerable and better suited to the development of tyranny than any old feudal system. Of course the transformation of the taxpaying small farmer into a deracinated wage slave made him less free, not more. Of course the abolition of public religion has done exactly what any sensible person before about a century ago could have warned you it would do.
> The reactionary knows all these things, and yet the question remains: How do we go back? This is the question guiding the book’s second part, “a handbook for would-be reactionaries…in open revolt against the modern world.”
> In the first part, Davis quotes Tolkien’s famous letter to his son voicing a draw towards anarcho-monarchy, a kind of return to the free kingship of the middle ages. Like most who quote from the letter, Davis omits the latter parts, which have some bearing on the second half of his book:
> But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin’s bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.
> “Dynamiting factories and power-stations” is radical action, and even most diehard reactionaries would forswear it today. I myself am obliged to tut-tut it, lest our friends in Langley place me on another watchlist. And yet there is a profound wisdom in Tolkien’s negativity: There is nowhere to fly to. The modern economic order, just like the modern political order, is all-encompassing, all-consuming, inescapable.
> …For a note of muted hope, as the battlefields of late modernity set themselves up and the Christian prepares for the coming turmoil, we might turn to a reactionary poet who did not quite make Davis’ list:
> …But as the turf divides /
I see in the slow progress of his strides /
Over the toppled clods and falling flowers, /
The timeless, surly patience of the serf /
That moves the nearest to the naked earth /
And ploughs down palaces, and thrones and towers
To me, this strongly resembles the “portraits of well-fed urban models posing as shepherdesses because Renaissance painters couldn’t deign to depict the grime and sunburn of real shepherds” – a phenomenon which Dr. Devereaux mocked so incisively in the Clothing series. Consequently, while, “similar shares of liberals (47%), moderates (47%), and conservatives (50%) consider the Middle Ages to have been a dark age.” I can’t help but wonder how many of the 18-29 crowd who opted for the “neither better nor worse” option (61%, vs. 57% for 30-44 and 47-48% for >45) did so not because of better education but due to being “millennial reactionaries” like the author of the above. The low partisan split on the issue (when we would expect it to follow age patterns more closely) suggests that fraction is not-inconsiderable. (Additional evidence: 18-29 cohort has the LEAST negative attitude towards the Crusades – the difference is small compared to over-45s, but remarkable next to 30-44 – those have the highest “very unfavorable” at 28%, vs. the lowest for 18-29 at 19%. Admittedly, 30-44 also has 11% “very favorable” towards them, vs. 6-8% for others.)
Another REALLY notable finding is that 9% of all respondents have a “very or somewhat favorable” opinion of…The Black Plague. That opinion is slightly Democratic-skewed (12%, vs. 7% for Republicans and independents), younger-skewed (14% for 18-29 and 30-44 (the latter have 7% VERY favourable) vs. 5% for 45-64 and 3% for >65), non-White skewed (6% for Whites, vs. 16% for Blacks and 11-14% for Hispanic and Other), higher-period-knowledge-skewed (17% of those with “a fair bit or more knowledge” vs. 8% with “a little” and 4% with “nothing”) and rich-skewed (8% for $100K). Somehow, I strongly doubt Dr. Devereaux, Bright Ages authors or most commenters here would be part of that 17% who approve of the Plague while claiming to have good knowledge of the period, so those are a lot of implications which warrant addressing.
*I note that The Bright Ages is featured on the Book Recommendations list here; however, their other work, Oathbreakers, is not. I presume it is simply because Dr. Devereaux has not yet had the time to read it yet and/or because it is “not non-fiction enough”, as opposed to what he perceives as more fundamental issues?
> Another REALLY notable finding is that 9% of all respondents have a “very or somewhat favorable” opinion of…The Black Plague.
I have some friends in market research, and they have informally come to the conclusion that people are a lot more willing to outright lie when responding to polls, possibly just to amuse themselves. “Ha ha, I told them the Black Plague was a good thing, and they believed me!”
It’s an informal conclusion because, well, how would you demonstrate it? Polls?
I have encountered a factoid that the Black Plague was a good thing in the long run that runs along the lines of:
“Life has always sucked because any economic gains get swamped by a combination of population growth and parasitical elites sucking up the extra wealth so everyone ends up on the ragged edge of starvation anyway.”
“But the Black Plague, (if you didn’t die) reduced the labor force and increased per capita wealth, so wages went up because of the labor shortage, so there was more capital investment and technological innovation, leading to more wealth production. And the parasitical elites haven’t been able suck it all up fast enough to get ahead of the curve, though they have certainly tried.”
(Note that I am not advocating this position, just noting it exists and some of the polling might reflect people who have heard it. Professor Devereaux has argued against many aspects of this along the way.)
I have heard of this argument before, but I wasn’t sure how widespread this thinking was. Now, if I am not misreading things, it appears that this year, at least one contributor to New Jersey Council for the Social Studies is openly advocating for that exact position to be taught in the classrooms?
https://teachingsocialstudies.org/2025/01/14/the-black-plague-a-positive-spin-on-death/
> How can mass mortality be viewed in a positive light? This is a question that arises when it comes to contemporary discussions of the fourteenth-century Black Death epidemic which wiped out nearly one-third of the population of Europe.[1] It is difficult to understate the immediate negative consequences of the Plague as it dismembered families, ripped apart social structures, and threw the economy into shock. Yet, some historians have now come to see the depopulation of the continent as a sort of necessary evil. Shortages of resources and job opportunities were prevalent by the beginning of the fourteenth century, especially in England, the country this paper will focus on.[2]
> In contrast, the Plague eliminated the shortages caused by overpopulation which immediately increased demand for workers. This led to increased wage growth and the widening of options of employment for average civilians. So, did the Black Death have a more positive or negative short-term impact on the English labor force? This essay argues that while the epidemic brought about a period of brief devastation, it ultimately eased the shortages of the years that preceded it leading to rapid labor reform which can be seen in first-hand accounts and the post-plague policies aimed at curtailing it.
>…It is not at all difficult to point out the destructive repercussions of the Black Death. By eliminating one-third of the population of Europe, it tore apart institutions, families, and impacted nearly every corner of society. However, there has emerged a sound argument for the Plague having a positive effect on English labor. Before the epidemic ravaged the country, England, like most places in the continent, was suffering immense shortages in both resources and job opportunities. However morbidly, the Black Death’s mortality ended this crisis and opened up the job market. As there were now shortages of workers, employers were forced to raise wages and benefits, and laborers could now leave their jobs (albeit illegally according to the Statutes) as there were other viable options.
> This trend was not without resistance and the English government attempted to stimy the advancements of employees in order to maintain the social structure. But, these policies prove that reform was indeed taking place, especially since there are many documented violations of them. As such, these circumstances beg the question, was the English workforce more positively or negatively affected by the Black Death? By ending the Malthusian Crisis of the early fourteenth century, the Plague opened up the job market increasing wages and opportunities for average English workers in a way that would not be seen again for centuries.
> Uses for Education…The Coronavirus Pandemic we all experienced is perfect fodder for a compare and contrast activity. A clear example is the fact that the Coronavirus was classified as a pandemic but was less deadly. Why was this the case? What were the characteristics of each that they were classified differently? Furthermore, one could easily conduct a simulation with this lesson. It might be a good idea to have the students imagine the methods they would use to handle the Black Death epidemic which might rationalize some of the actions taken by Plague doctors. And if you’re looking for a lesson specifically concerning the labor reforms discussed in this article, consider tying it in with your economics unit. It’s a clear example of supply and demand. There is definitely no shortage of options for lessons on this topic, which could be an eye-opening, yet relatable subject for your class.
Aaand that’s a segue into the topic of “decadence”, dammit.
Funnily enough, just because it has traits of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a simple low-stakes situation people’s actions change less than their beliefs, so mostly you can poll it just fine. Yes, in Quakerland the people are really more honest and conscientious, so (with a “lizardman constant” of less than 5%) they will honestly report “most people are honest and conscientious”. Whereas in Trollistan there will really be as much as 20% who say outrageous things (e.g. the same thing as above) for the lulz, but the large majority of respondents will still honestly report that “most people don’t care whether the things they say are true, and they cannot be relied upon”.
Or to narrow it down to politics: as the increasingly more people are involved (and the higher the stakes), the increasingly important the difference becomes between “yes there are a few bad apples, but that is an aberration”, “eh of course everyone is in it for self-interest, but everyone carefully maintains plausible deniability”, “haha everyone openly breaks the rules”, “where did the empire go, there are just a large number of petty warlords?”, and a few varieties along the way. It is well-analyzed with some empires (e.g. Seleucid, or the Mingsplosion here) that either no governor revolted (because the one that tried to would be hammered into the ground by the imperial army) or all of them revolted at the same time. There doesn’t need there to be any difference in the fundamentals between the two states, it can be a matter purely of what decisionmakers believe about what the others believe. Likewise, the difference between “polities (including monarchies) routinely have multiple armies in the field (because the generals stay loyal)” and “polities have one substantial field army — the one lead by the monarch — because if they ever had another, its commander would quickly turn pretender, including the heir designate rebelling against their father” is …cultural.
Of course, beliefs about the base phenomenon of decadence can be hilarious (“the Seleucids and a subset of the emperors suffered from decadence because Syria is warm and dry”). However, I can’t help but have nonzero credulousness toward the idea that a cultural phenomenon can be, you know, be transmitted in the usual ways culture is transmitted, partly as opposed to being completely independently developed (albeit this one is an extremely simple one and thus subject to convergent occurrence), and that some people might have vaguely correct-leaning observations about the pedigree of cultural phenomena of their own time.
In January, I pointed out that at least one poll taken in the recent years suggests significant fractions of first-world countries’ citizens (that is, a majority in 4 out of 5 countries surveyed) expect their society to collapse, and most of those place that outcome within the immediately foreseeable future. Follow-up questions taken in France have unsurprisingly suggested this already bleeds into major decisions people make, such as who to vote for.
https://acoup.blog/2025/01/10/fireside-friday-january-10-2025/#comment-75217
I am not sure if this ought to be called “decadence” per se, but it’s clearly connected to your point.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant
‘Coined by Scott Alexander in 2013 in a post titled “Lizardman’s Constant is 4%”, responding to a Public Policy Polling statement that “four percent of Americans believe lizardmen are running the Earth”.’
Yeah, I thought that framing of “The Middles Ages were worse than what came before and after” vs. “Eh, it’s all the same” was particularly loaded, and kind of damaged the credibility of the entire survey in my eyes.
I can think of three plausible reasons why someone might say (especially someone on the more ‘intellectual’ side) that “the Black Death was good actually”. (Not saying that I particularly agree with them- while I sympathise with the goals, I think there are better ways of getting there than epidemics and mass death).
If you’re an environmentalist who thinks there are too many humans on the planet and we exert too much damage to the natural environment, and that this has been the case for a long time, then you might see any substantial reduction in population (at least when it doesn’t involve the wholesale destruction of a whole society) as a good thing. If you’re on the left, you might see the increased bargaining power for rural workers after the rural depopulation as a good thing. And if you’re a religious conservative, you might see it as a good thing that Europe is believed to have gotten somewhat more religious after the Black Death.
Part of the problem is one of simple timing: If you compare say, 600 AD. to 150 AD, then yeah, things look a lot worse. If you’re comparing 300 AD to 1100 AD you get a different picture, etc.
(this also applies to technology more broadly: While there were a lot of stuff that was lost or no longer useful by the fall of Rome, by the end of middle-ages there were also a whole lot of technologies around the romans didn’t have)
“Another REALLY notable finding is that 9% of all respondents have a “very or somewhat favorable” opinion of…The Black Plague. ”
This is probably related to a garbled understanding of the labour history consequences of the plague; IE (in western europe, in the east it went the opposite way) increasing wages and relative peasant bargaining power.
This might be connected to “Middle Ages = Catholic = Bad” / “USA = Protestant = Good”.
Among the major targets of the revived KKK in the 1920’s were Catholic churches.
Richard the Lionheart, Thomas Aquinas, and Charlemagne also have considerably more favorable than unfavorable views. Majorities of Americans have no opinion about Aquinas, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Moses Mainonides, Hildegard of Bingen, and Saladin. The most divisive medieval figure of the 10 is William the Conqueror, with 33% favorable and 23% unfavorable.
Super fascinating.
My views of Thomas Aquinas have gone from moderately favorable to extremely unfavorable, sort of concomitant with my changing religious views. I think it’s probably almost impossible to evaluate someone like Thomas Aquinas in an ideologically neutral way.
A few other interesting tidbits from the detailed poll:
* Whenever “Don’t Know/Not Sure” option is available women respondents ALWAYS select it more often than men – generally, an extra ~10% opt for it over something else. With only a few exceptions (i.e. the construction of Notre-Dame), they are also more likely to pick “I know nothing about this event” (which is available alongside “Not Sure” for “Did this occur during Middle Ages” part of the poll.) Similar pattern occurs with wealth – respondents with 65s are. This seems to correspond with what our host wrote years ago about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-assassins-creed-valhalla/
* Harris voters are somewhat more likely to approve of Gothic Architecture than Trump voters (70% to 63%). They exhibit slightly more approval of the Gregorian Chant as well, but it’s the opposite for Monasteries.
* Trump 2024 voters have a markedly more positive opinion of “Chivalry” (34% very favorable, 39% somewhat favorable, 7% somewhat unfavorable, 2% very unfavorable, 18% “don’t know”) than Harris voters (21%, 41%, 13%, 5%, 20%, respectively). This is largely mirrored as a sliding scale across the Democratic-Independent-Republican divide and across age. Interestingly, out of racial categories, Hispanics are by far the most likely to have a very favorable opinion (37%, vs. 28% for Whites and 15% for Blacks), although the total distribution of favorable/unfavorable/don’t know is 61/14/25 for Hispanics, 68/11/22 for Whites, 43/17/40 for Blacks and 61/11/28 for Other.
* Trump 2024 voters are actually less likely to use “religious” as an adjective for Middle Ages then Harris voters (39% vs. 49%.) Even more interestingly, while the 39% for Trump voters exactly matches the percentage of registered Republicans with the same opinion, that percentage for Harris voters markedly exceeds the 42% of registered Democrats (and 42% of independents) who think the same. The only group with similar or higher use of that descriptor are >$100K (also 49%) and those with a lot of knowledge on the period (63%.)
* That last group is also far more likely to call the period “wealthy” (12%) than those with “little” or “nothing” knowledge (8% and 4%, respectively), which suggests consumption of particularly elite-centered material. Granted, the “most knowledge” group is more likely to use every single objective than the others, but the difference is at its most stark here (as well as with the “Heroic”, “Romantic” and “Innovative” descriptors.)
* 22% of Americans think THE FRENCH REVOLUTION took place in the Middle Ages. Moreover, that is a REMARKABLY consistent fraction across every single crosstab – even amongst those who claim to know a lot about the period (those actually have it at 25%) and the >$100K income demographic (21%). The only difference is whether the majority of a demographic KNOWS it didn’t take place there, or is merely “Not Sure”. People are actually somewhat better able to date the Salem Witch Trials (which of course had occurred a century prior) – then again, the latter ARE an American event (though even then, 18% get wrong – vs. 15% who get Mayflower wrong, implying there’s 3% of Americans who think Middle Ages stopped when the Pilgrims sailed, then restarted sometime after they arrived.)
* The full poll describes the outcome of The Battle of Agincourt as “English longbowmen defeat French knights”, which is unlikely to make Our Gracious Host and his fellow historians very happy.
P.S. I am disappointed at how thoroughly the poll ignores Eastern and Central Europe. There is absolutely no reason why the list of historical figures which included Saladin, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Moses Maimonides couldn’t have featured, say, Boleslaus, the effective founder of Bohemia (particularly relevant with the popularity of K:CD!) or Alexander Nevsky (who, like Saladin, fought against a Crusade – even as he is frequently treated in revisionist history as having permanently “turned Russia away from the West and towards “Oriental despotism” by doing so with Tatar-Mongol help) or Vladimir the Great (the bringer of Christianity to Kievan Rus’) or even Rurik (the possibly-mythical founder of it). Likewise, its list of events which did/did not take place in the Middle Ages (which goes to the extent of mentioning the demise of Knights Templar) could have easily included the “Golden Horde’s” conquest of Rus’, the divisions of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Peter the Great defeating Sweden to establish St. Petersburg, the November Uprising of Poland against the Russian Empire, etc.
Argh, WordPress must have treated a combination of ” In 1988, a scholar named John Edwards published an analysis of a “book of declarations” made by the Spanish Inquisition documenting 444 statements made in Spain by people of varying statuses between the year 1486 and the year 1500 that were deemed heretical or blasphemous.
> Some of the statements recorded in the book seem relatively tame to present-day Christians, but were seen as shockingly heretical to the Inquisition authorities. For instance, in around 1488, a peasant woman named Juana Perez is reported to have said that good Jews and Muslims would attain salvation. This is an idea that many liberal Christians today accept. At the time, though, it went against the official orthodoxy, which was that only Christians could attain salvation. Juana Perez wasn’t alone in her universalism; eight men were prosecuted with her for making similar statements.
> At some point during the Granada War (lasted 1482 – 1492), a miller named Diego de San Martin complained to a farmer named Gil Recio that there was no rain. Gil is reported to have replied, “How do you expect it to rain when the king is going to take the Moors’ home away, when they haven’t done him any harm?” Diego replied that it was good for a Christian king to take land away from Muslims. Gil replied, “How does anyone know which of the three laws God loves best?”
> Some of the other statements recorded in the book are even more heretical. In 1498, a man named Diego de Barrionuevo is reported to have said, “I swear to God that this hell and paradise is nothing more than a way of frightening us, like people saying to children, ‘Avanti coco’ [‘The bogeyman will get you’].”
> Shockingly, the book contains record of flagrantly anti-religious statements made even by members of the clergy. For instance, in around 1485 in Aranda, a local cleric named Diego Mexias is reported to have said that heaven and hell do not exist, that there is no afterlife at all, and that “there is nothing except being born and dying, and having a nice girlfriend and plenty to eat.”
> One thing that is remarkable about these statements is that they were made openly, without any apparent fear of prosecution; in other words, these people really didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition. This gives us good reason to think that doubts like these were probably being voiced by various people all over Europe throughout the Middle Ages. We only know about the cases listed here because the Spanish Inquisition was particularly diligent in prosecuting heretics.
> Although we lack direct evidence, we have reason to suspect that there were some medieval scholars who privately had doubts about the existence of God. One interesting piece of evidence is the fact that medieval theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury (lived c. 1033 – 1109) and Thomas Aquinas (lived 1225 – 1274) went to great effort writing arguments attacking atheism and defending the existence of God.
> No one writes an argument against a position unless it is at least conceivable that someone might support that position. Therefore, the fact that medieval theologians felt the need to compose arguments for the existence of God seems to demonstrate that either these theologians believed that there were other scholars out there who doubted the existence of God or the theologians themselves had private doubts about the existence of God that they were trying to assuage.
> I think it is clear at this point that the modern impression that medieval western Europe was an orthodox Catholic monolith is mistaken.
AGAIN?!! Oh, to have the “preview” function on here!
Basically, blog software appears to be treating some signs and symbols I used from the poll as a trigger to remove lines. What I meant to write the first time was that the least-wealthy respondents are more likely to say they don’t know or have no knowledge of an event by a substantial margin (but there is often almost no difference between the wealthiest and the “middle class”) – however, I could find no strong pattern for age categories.
The other thing is that the opinion on the Vikings becomes slightly, but consistently more positive the younger the respondents get. That is, 21% very favorable for the youngest cohort vs. 11% for the oldest. Very unfavorable is equally low for every cohort at 6-7%, but if 18% of 18-34 are somewhat unfavorable, 25% of “65 and older” are. This seems to correspond with what our host wrote years ago about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
And likewise, one of the VERY few outright ZERO % results in this poll is amount of “65 and older” who have a very favorable opinion of The Inquisition – while 45-64 are at 4%, 30-44 at 7% and 18-29 at 6%. It’s almost as drastic for “somewhat favorable” – 6% of over-65s, 8% of 45-64, 18% of 30-44 and 16% of 18-29 AND for very unfavorable – 48% of over-65s, 38% of 45-64, 26% for 30-44 and 24% for 18-29. (“Somewhat unfavorable” is fairly steady at 12-16% for every cohort.)
Oldest people are the least likely to respond with “Don’t Know” as well – 29% of over-65s, 38% of 45-64, 35% for 30-44 and 40% for 18-29. Hence, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the American people have become markedly MORE supportive of the historical Inquisition over time. Thus, the above comment was in relation to that apparent growing fondness for The Inquisition. Unfortunately, the link I quoted from was also “consumed”, so I’ll have to repost it again. After all, it provides a lot of additional information on “Dark Ages” as well.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/05/25/debunking-the-so-called-dark-ages/
P.S. The one amusing data artefact in that poll is that the Hispanic respondents are, for whatever reason, over twice as likely to have a very favorable opinion of The Hundred Years’ War than every other group (8% vs. 3%).
I would be surprised if more than a tiny fraction of Americans have even heard of Boleslaus or Alexander Nevsky. As conventionally taught in American schools, post-Roman history focuses primarily on English history until 1620 or maybe 1776, a defensible choice since our political institutions, our language obviously, and many other aspects of our culture were shaped primarily by our English heritage. The Crusades, and thus Saladin, are part of English history since the English participated in them, whereas neither Boleslaus or Alexander Nevsky interacted with the English at all, to my knowledge.
Well, that’s a fair argument…but then, are Eleanor of Aquitaine, Moses Maimonides and Hildegard of Bingen “conventionally taught in American schools” as well? I would be surprised to find out that is the case – and yet, they happen to be in that poll.
If they aren’t, and Gallup nevertheless inquired about some figures not present in typical American education, it would make sense to broaden it to other figures as well, such as those I mentioned.
Granted, perhaps the main reason for the addition of Eleanor and Hildegard was to ensure Joan of Arc isn’t the lone female figure…well, there were still more options such as the Irene of Athens or the Olga of Kiev [Wikipedia’s preferred spelling] a regnant widow who became one after the uprising in what is now Northern Ukraine killed her husband when he tried to “renegotiate” the amount of tribute extracted from them with less than his usual amount of soldiers present to protect him. She responded by, amongst other things, burning down their capital, Korosten, through the use of messenger pigeons she requested from the city as a tribute, only to send them back with incendiaries tied to their feet.
This may or may not have been apocryphal – yet she was nevertheless declared a saint afterwards, for being the first Slavic ruler to adopt and begin spreading Christianity – a task which was concluded by the aforementioned Vladimir the Great. It’s even more interesting that she was omitted after her story predictably received greater valence in the recent years, as summarized below.
https://theconversation.com/saint-olga-of-kyiv-is-ukraines-patron-saint-of-both-defiance-and-vengeance-178019
(The response from readers of that publication to her exploits had been…mixed – and that was after the author left out the completely understandable reason why “Drevlians, a neighbouring tribe, rose up against his rule and murdered him”. Add in the fact the decision to kill him was made via a vote of the veche – about the most democratic form of decision-making which existed in Slavic lands in that time, and which was consistently suppressed by Olga’s descendants whenever they went, most notably by Ivan the Terrible at Novgorod – and the story could be easily interpreted to have a meaning opposite of the one intended by the author.)
I can guarantee that no member of my family or stepfamily have ever heard of any of these historic figures, much less Saladin. What they know about the 14th C Bubonic Plague likely won’t fill a teaspoon, and if they heard of it, they heard of it during Covid. They are the majority of Out There.
A quick question: was the cursus honorum an up or out, or could you stand for election to the next position, lose, and potentially try again after you had done something to burnish your reputation?
Similarly, were the former X groups in the Senate truly done with rising, or just marking time until trying to move up again if they wished?
“A quick question: was the cursus honorum an up or out, or could you stand for election to the next position, lose, and potentially try again after you had done something to burnish your reputation?”
Winning an office “suo anno” was a distinction to brag about.
For a high profile example of a Roman who tried to stand or run (did Romans stand like Britons or run like USians?) for a consul, remember L. Sergius Catilina. Tried three consecutive elections. First time, candidacy not accepted. Second time, lost to M. Tullius Cicero. Third time, lost as well.
You could stay, and it was a mix. There were families where generation after generation only made praetor, or whatever, and never went for the brass ring.
I’m sure this is both knowledge known to you and will be too late to be useful, but my favorite thing in Mobile is the USS Alabama. It’s amazing to walk a high battleship, you really get a pretty free tour of the whole ship, and it’s fascinating.
I do wonder if the limits of ancient or even just pre-modern generalship are such that something like formal officer training wouldn’t have much of anything to teach anyway. After all, societies with a lot less formal progression through ranks than the Roman Republic still seem to have some consistency in possessing at least half-decent military leaders. I wonder if the Roman system might be more exceptional for the extent to which they could be kind of self-aware of the military capabilities of their aristocrats, and apply their assignments more systematically. Compared to something like Medieval military leaders, that I think could be called more ad hoc in the extent to which distribution of leadership is based also on court culture and wars in general are often personal ventures.
I can see how one of these things might prove more effective at building an empire than the other, even any point at which one could say the Republic has an outright policy of deliberate expansionism.
Well, we have surviving texts from various Chinese, Greek, and Roman eras about how to raise, equip, and manage armies; even a couple from China and Greece about unusual tricks. At least one of these, the Byzantine “Strategikon”, was written by the Emperor so I assume people payed attention.
My understanding is that military effectiveness, ancient and modern, depends very heavily on boring but consistent logistics, equipment, doctrine. These are the kinds of things that checklists and manuals help a lot with.
These rarely get noticed in histories, but even so we can see that in a couple of battles the junior officers in the Roman army seem to “do the right thing” without the general actually being there. That’s not going to happen unless all the officers have a more or less consistent doctrine.
Topic-Wishlist for Bret to do some day:
– Your opinion on Kingdome Come Deliverance 2; Could also be in a less research-intensive format as a lighter and more general “things you liked and things you didn’t like from a historical point of view when you finished (ot stopped) playing it
– Weapons that also function as tools; what would a lower-class conscript bring on campaign or buy in the first place? In that regard things like padded armour worn as clothing in peacetime etc.
– Having articles about certain weapons, their development through the ages, in which situations they where used, etc.
– Your teased take on Boromirs fate. Another interesting Tolkien-topic would be your take on Saurons plan to control the people and realms of middle-earth with the rings. Was it not doomed to fail from the start even if his plan worked? The Nine gave him no control over any realms (unless thats the reason many humans fight for him) longterm
If I may shill for one of my favorite youtubers: Kriegsspiel! How Napoleon Accidentally Invented Strategy Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6Am1Gjr74A
There is a section where he talks about an active, welcoming discord server where players write orders to subordinate units in gunpowder-age battle using the rules of Kriegspiel and rules-knowing umpires adjudicate the movements, accounting for delay/friction of premodern communication, morale, terrain, and so on. Although he uses a good deal of Total War for footage there’s nothing that seems to contradict what Bret has written about how premodern command worked in the gunpowder era, although he does seem to have a limited grasp of the ancient limitations of command in early phalanges to legions.
He also still holds on to the hypothesis, (not in this video), of a fundamentally different internal psychology of ancient people expounded upon in Terence Hawkins’ *The Rage Of Achilles*, which I am given to understand is poorly regarded by ancient historians.
I had to look up what that last thing was about, and apparently, it’s this.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/11/09/were-ancient-people-conscious/
> In 1976, the American psychologist Julian Jaynes (lived 1920 – 1997) published a controversial book titled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In this book, Jaynes claimed that human beings were not conscious of their own thoughts until around 1000 BC and that stories about gods speaking to people originated from people hearing their own inner voices and mistaking them for the voices of external deities telling them what to do.
> …In the book, Jaynes argues that the human mind was once divided into two separate parts: a part which seemed to be speaking and a part which listened and obeyed. He thought that people in ancient times mistook this inner voice for the voice of a divine figure commanding them to do things. Jaynes called this idea of the mind being divided into two parts “bicamerality.”
> Jaynes argued that the bicameral mind broke down around 3,000 years ago around the same time of the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean. According Jaynes, with the breakdown of the bicameral mind came the beginnings of modern consciousness. He posits that the people we call “schizophrenics” are actually people who have retained vestiges of the original bicameral mind and that, if anyone from ancient times were alive today, we would probably call them “schizophrenic” as well.
> Nonetheless, despite widespread academic rejection, Jaynes’s hypothesis has managed to seep its way into popular culture. For instance, in 2006, an author named Terence Hawkins published a fictional novel titled The Rage of Achilles, which retells the story of the Iliad using Jaynes’s hypothesis as a naturalistic explanation for all the encounters with deities in the epic. In Hawkins’s novel, the Greek hero Odysseus and the Trojan prince Paris are portrayed as having non-bicameral minds, while the other characters are portrayed as having bicameral ones.
…Words fail me. All the more so upon noting those who swarmed to defend this idea in the comments of that post. Our Gracious Host never bothered to write anything about this idea, but I think the series on “Practical Polytheism” alone rather conclusively shows that the recorded structure of ancient religion does not match any of this. Moreover, as far as I can tell, this theory seems to presuppose total lack of any animal consciousness at its foundation. By now, 560 scholars and counting (including figures like the head of Allen Institute for Brain Science) have signed New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness asserting the exact opposite.
To defend George here, I think he’s going with the much weaker claim that ancient people interpreted their thoughts differently than the strong claim, which is literally that bronze age people did not have ‘conscious thought’ which is of course ludicrous The weak claim is still indefensible of course, I always appreciate a link to a Spencer article I haven’t read yet.
In other news, I joined the discord in question and am currently having great fun as a ~division staff officer writing orders for some dragoons screening the advance of our division. I am currently waiting for the results with anticipation. I have gotten some appreciated editing advice gratis abouty order writing style, which is a little too verbose and influenced by the modern 5-paragraph operation order style, which is both ever too long to be conveyed by a courier of the period and a slog for the umpires to resolve in a timely fashion.
When your graphic says “c. 295 – 91 BCE”, I can’t tell whether it’s saying that the illustrated system is more or less in place over the five-year period between 295 BC and 291 BC, or over the 205-year period between 295 BC and 91 BC. I would prefer that the labeling be unambiguous, either saying “c. 295 BCE – 91 BCE” or “c. 295 – 291 BCE”. (Or “c. 295 BCE – 291 BCE”, but in that case we can lose the first BCE without introducing any ambiguity.)
Food for thought, mostly, in case you ever need to make slides in the future.
Reading the abstract, now I’m curious on how the system can propagate needed competent changes for the military. This blog tells me that Roman military itself improve upon the centuries, but how do they keep up with latest trends, and how did this system help them? This seems like regular osmosis, which if anything, will keep conservatism high.
Well, the Roman system rotates a *lot* of people through military command slots by limiting them to one year each (most of the time), same for the civilian administrators who may have to deal with foreign raiders / invaders. So if Gaius comes back from his year in Hispania and says that the local Celts have some really great swords, and then Lucius comes back and says yeah those Hispanic swords are nice, and then Julius …
Sure, they’re not always going to agree or be consistent; but it seems to me the system does provide exposure to new ways of doing things for many of the people in power. And Romans as a whole, most of the time, do seem confident that they can copy ideas from other people without being corrupted / weakened by doing so.
The historical example seems to suggest that the legion that does not adapt will fail, in which case either the obtuse consul dies with it or needs to return to Rome to face the scorn of the senate and people and be replaced by somebody whose more recent experience in the lower ranks seems to be more adaptive.
There’s an extent to which that system also selects against needed adaptations (they did not initially appreciate how Fabius was responding to Hannibal’s capabilities), but it would seem that at any given time that happened Rome’s base assets were sufficient to allow it to weather such errors until they realised what was needed.
There have been other experiments in rapid rotation of people through military slots in recent history. One such was American junior officers in Vietnam, where lieutenants were rotated through units IIRC every six months at one point.
This experiment doesn’t appear to have been all that successful according to what I’ve read. Low morale among the troops, bad decisions by the officer, etc.
What are the major differences between the two? Probably:
– The Roman system occurred over centuries and seems to have been well in place and was just “the way things are done” by the time we have any record of it. The American experiment seems to have tried to serve multiple purposes, among one of which was to get a bunch of officers who had seen some sort of combat.
– Even the lowest level of Roman officer (tribune) still ended up controlling many more troops than an American lieutenant. At the American level I think the equivalent would be one of the various types of centurion.
– From one of OGH’s previous recommendations (Inside the Roman Legions: The Soldier’s Experience 264-107 BCE), the Roman legion was acting according to (or at least not against) the will of the gods. Many things that we would consider routine, e.g. moving out of camp in the morning, *wouldn’t happen* without a favorable (or at least not unfavorable) set of omens. If the consul died, there wasn’t a second in command that immediately took over because the consul was in many ways also the priest, the one who communicated between heaven and earth.
– The troops are different. I’m not sure how much importance I place on this one. Yes, they have received more years of public education, but I don’t know how much this counts. More important would be the different culture: the past is a different country and they do things differently. Romans were not Americans in togas.
It may be significant that the military tribunes potentially have line soldier/centurion experience before becoming military tribunes. Most US commissioned officers have never been enlisted, so newly rotated-in lieutenants may have no field experience whatsoever. That’s not good for decision-making and probably bad for morale; the enlisted see their officer making a mistake they learned to avoid in their third month in the field and doubt their overall command ability.
I think this a very important point. The CO/NCO divide of modern armies is something that developed contingent on the Early Modern aristocracy in armies and results in a very different experience curve than the less stratified service + cursus honorum that Rome had.
It’s also notable that one theory is that Sun Tzu (乾杯!) had to write his book of “Please remember to forage, instead of wasting state money” is because he was faced with a similar problem, that a lot of fellow army-leaders were chosen from aristocratic stock who had served in the king’s court but never been on the battlefield before.
AIUI, the Republic was forming a unit out of people who knew each other slightly, and some of whom had fought with each other before, keeping it together for a year or two, and then disbanding it, in the expectation that most people would return to their homes near each other. The Vietnam era American Army was… not doing that.
>> the Republic was forming a unit out of people who knew each other slightly
Not really. In fact, the way the levy was formed in Rome was done to *deliberately* mix Romans from different tribes together. It was in many ways the exact opposite of the Pals Battalions from WW1.
“the Romans could boast of relatively few ‘military geniuses.’”
I mean, is that so?
In the one case of a non-Roman general considered a military genius – Hannibal – the war saw two Roman generals able to match him – Marcellus & Scipio – operating at the same time. Admittedly with a logistical advantage, Marcellus in particular, but still.
The opportunity to match up against other commonly-accepted ‘Military Geniuses’ was then no longer available on account of a dearth of Hannibals in the subsequent two centuries, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot, if anything, to distinguish Marius’ string of victories, Lucullus’ reputation, Ventidius’ reversing Roman fortunes vs the Parthians or Caesar’s campaigning in Gaul from Marcellus’ campaigns preceding the 2nd Punic War or Scipio’s buggering about in Iberia (with no Hannibal in the vicinity) for years and years.
I’m deeply suspicious that had the major Roman generals been the kings of a hellenistic state, they would’ve been hailed as military geniuses. But since they served the republic, and since the republic had a lot of armies led by a lot of generals, they got a lot less bling attached to their achievements.
Just taking the major figures between the 2nd Punic War and the establishment of the Principate, we have… Scipio, Marcellus, Marius, arguably Sulla, arguably Lucullus, Pompeius, Caesar, Ventidius, Agrippa…
That’s rather a lot of exceptional generals over the course of 180 years. And oftentimes two or three of them operating at the same time. Half a dozen of them with strings of victories that are a match for Alexander or Philip.
When reading the “workmanlike generals” comment in the past, I’ve wondered if Roman’s long success and military system might make geniuses stand out less. Hannibal, Alexander, Pyrrhus stand out as unusually successful because their societies otherwise did poorly, Scipio, Marcellus, and the others Rezo might mention tend to win battles in a society that often wins battles, so their extra skills are more subtle. And possibly, they do less unusual things because they have a solid military to command, so doing the same things a not as killed general would is more often the best option, so there are fewer differences to spot.
Records might also make a difference. For Rome, we have pretty decent records (for ancient times) of most of the commanders and what they were doing. For other civilizations, we don’t. Maybe Pharaonic Egypt, Achaemenids, Assyrians, Warring states Chinese, Smaller India region polities, etc. had plenty of “solid, workmanlike generals” but the poor records mean we don’t hear about them so much, just the big conquerors who make a splash, or ones that happen to show up in someone else’s story. (If that someone is a big conqueror, said solid workmanlike commanders would then be the losers, which reduces reader’s impression of them.)
the bigger deal is repetition. the genius is the guy that wins battle after battle. if hannibal had just won cannae then been replaced by some other guy next year, it would go down as a great victory, but he wouldn’t be hailed as a unique genius. Roman commanders commanded for only a couple years, and so didn’t get the chance to win the series of great victories needed to establish their genius.
War is a complicated and difficult enough thing that there is an opportunity for genius to express itself even against conventional or mediocre opponents.
And I think your given list is still pretty small in light of the fact that Rome has another two new generals every year for the next two hundred years following Hannibal.
Not necessarily. In the 200s BC Mediterranean region (to pick a specific time and place for fair comparison), you have Hannibal and Pyrrhus as the celebrated non-Roman geniuses, and Scipio plus maybe Marcellus as the Roman ones. Egypt, Seleucids, Macedon aren’t described as producing similarly influential/well known generals, same with Numidian kingdoms, Spanish tribal areas, etc. for smaller political entities.
So it might be that, added together, non-Roman areas produce about the same fraction of geniuses as Rome does. Measuring this is impossible I’d assume since history doesn’t record in such detail for everyone, but it isn’t out of the question.
To quote Sun Tzu (乾杯!) again:
“To see victory only when it is within the ken of the common herd is not the acme of excellence. Neither is it the acme of excellence if you fight and conquer and the whole Empire says, “Well done!” To lift an autumn hair is no sign of great strength; to see the sun and moon is no sign of sharp sight; to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear. What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease.”
What distinguishes a great general from a workmanlike one is not the number of won battles, but the ability to rise above the level of rote application of doctrine. That’s why a lot of victorious Roman generals don’t get that title, because even if they won a lot, they won by taking a standard Roman legion, getting it to the enemy with standard Roman logistics and won with standard Roman tactics.
Pyrrhus isn’t a great general because he managed to grind his way through a Roman army (though it helps), but because he managed to improvise *and implement* a new formation on the fly to integrate his new Italian troops despite the language barriers and differences in doctrine. Hannibal isn’t a great general because he managed to annihilate a Roman army at Cannae (though it helps), but because he managed to figure out the logistics of *walking* all the way around the Mediterranean to avoid the Roman navy, and then managed to formulate *and implement* a tactical playbook designed to counter the Roman tactical doctrine, despite his army mostly consisting of people who he had picked up along the way and whose language he didn’t speak.
“(If that someone is a big conqueror, said solid workmanlike commanders would then be the losers, which reduces reader’s impression of them.)”
On a related note, Marcus Licinius Crassus had a pretty solid career, serving as one of Sulla’s subordinates and being a critical factor in Sulla’s eventual victory, and later defeating Spartacus.
Added a bit of a blemish to his career in his sixties, but well…
The discussion of the “attitudes towards Medieval” survey interested me enough that I decided to see if it had equivalents in the other places. This led me to a Polish survey from 2016 which asked respondents about their knowledge and attitudes towards their own history – not quite the same thing, but I suspect others here will find it quite interesting for multiple reasons. For instance, the way this blog stresses “people in the past believed their own religion” may have the unintended effect of flattening the differences in how strongly the people in the present may also believe their own religion. The Polish in general may not be swearing oaths under the procedure they would have followed in the medieval times anymore, but I still think a lot of these results will still give pause to outside readers. (Machine-translated.)
https://kulturaenter.pl/article/raport-swiadomosc-historyczna-polakow/
> The largest number of people (70%) consider the baptism of Poland to be a key event in the history of Poland before 1918. This result is undoubtedly influenced by the round anniversary of this event celebrated this year…Next, respondents mention the May 3rd Constitution (59%) and the Battle of Grunwald (44%).
> Among the events of the 20th and 21st centuries, the most important, according to the majority of Poles (52%), is the regaining of independence in 1918. The election of Karol Wojtyła as pope ceased to occupy the first place in the hierarchy – it recorded a drop of 19 percentage points compared to 2014 (to 43% in 2016).
> We verified the declarations of Poles by asking about their historical knowledge – this was an open-ended question about knowledge of the events behind eight dates in Polish history. Most people (82%) correctly answered what happened in 1939. A similarly high percentage of correct answers concerned 1410 (80%). It can be assumed that the good knowledge of just this date is to some extent due to the annual re-enactments of the Battle of Grunwald, widely reported in the media.
> Only half of Poles are able to connect the date of 1989 with the fall of communism, the Round Table deliberations or the first partially free elections. Some (6%) give answers that make fragmentary references to systemic changes, and 43% of respondents do not associate a proper event from Poland’s recent history with 1989. The least familiar are the events hiding under the date of 1791 – the vast majority of Poles (87%) do not mention the enactment of the May 3 Constitution here – and 1863 (79% do not remember that the January Uprising broke out then).
> The Partitions of Poland, the Swedish Deluge or other wars of the 17th century are considered crucial to Poland’s fate by no more than 11% of respondents. It can be assumed that this is due to a reluctance to attribute the greatest importance to the negative aspects of Polish history. However, other positive events presented in the survey (such as the founding of the University of Cracow or the coronations of the kings of Poland) also appeared to be rarely regarded as crucial to the fate of our country.
> More often than others, the importance of Poland’s baptism is emphasized by respondents aged 18 to 24 (79%), those with a high school education (77%) and those with the lowest per capita household income (80%). Less appreciative of the importance of the event are those over 65 (65%) and executives or professionals with higher education (54%). Attitudes toward Poland’s baptism as a landmark event are significantly differentiated by frequency of religious practice – among those who practice several times a week, 93% consider it the most significant event in Poland’s history, while among those who do not practice at all, 58% do.
> The Battle of Grunwald is more often considered a landmark pre-1918 event by middle-level workers (61%), men more often than women (51% and 39%, respectively), and more often by those who identify with the right (47%) than with the left (37%). Significantly less frequently, people from cities of more than half a million people (37%), executives (35%) and the religiously non-practicing (36%) indicate this battle as significant for history.
> The importance attributed to the adoption of the May 3 Constitution is significantly higher among employees of state and public institutions (70%) and those with the highest incomes (74%), while it is significantly lower among farmers (39%) and respondents who rate their own material conditions as poor (40%). World War I, the end of the European order established at the Congress of Vienna (1914-1918), is more often rated as the most pivotal event by those with higher education (45%) and those working in managerial positions (48%). Less often than the rest, it is considered the most significant event by respondents with basic vocational education (14%), unskilled workers (14%) and pensioners (13%)
> Among those with above-average interest in history, the hierarchy of the most significant events for our country looks almost identical to that of the general population. The same percentage of people (70%) consider the baptism of Poland to be the key event, the May 3 Constitution (65%) comes in second place, with a 6 percentage point higher share of indications than among the general population, and almost half consider the Battle of Grunwald (46%) to be the most significant event.
> More than one in five respondents (23%) consider the German invasion of September 1, 1939 to be the most significant for the history of modern Poland. Slightly fewer, 15% of Poles point to the rise of “Solidarity” as the most important event of the 20th and 21st centuries. A similar percentage of respondents consider Poland’s accession to NATO as such an event (13%). Every tenth person gives a key role to the Katyn massacre and the 1989 Round Table talks (10% each). Other facts from World War II and the history of the Polish People’s Republic are much less frequently mentioned as the most important for Poland’s history.
> The most frequently attributed key significance in the recent history of Poland is the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope by unskilled workers and farmers (60% each) and pensioners (61%). This fact is significantly less often appreciated by pupils and students (21%) and people who do not participate in religious practices at all (19%).
> Poland’s accession to the European Union is considered more often than others to be the most important event of the 20th and 21st centuries by administrative and office workers (48%), people with higher education and pupils and students (44% each). The oldest people (23%) and pensioners (20%) are much less likely to indicate Poland’s accession to the EU as an important event from the point of view of the fate of Poland.
> The importance given to the fall of communism is highest among middle-level personnel and technicians (46%), and significantly lower than average – among people with the lowest per capita income in the household (21%), those who assess their own financial situation as bad (22%), those with primary or secondary education (22%) and among residents of cities with up to 20,000 inhabitants (22%).
> We asked the question about the importance given to events in Poland’s recent history for the third time. Compared to 2009, the percentage of those who considered regaining independence to be the most significant moment increased (from 47% to 52%). Compared to 2014, the percentage of indications of the German invasion of Poland in 1939 increased (from 19% to 23%) and the Round Table talks (from 6% to 10%). In the last two years, the importance given to the election of Karol Wojtyła as pope has decreased (from 62% to 43%). As a result, the hierarchy of the most important events has changed: in 2009 and 2014, the election of a Pole as pope was in first place, while the regaining of independence was in second place. Currently, these events have swapped places on the list of the most significant events of the 20th and 21st centuries. Percentages do not add up to 100, because respondents could mention more than one event
> Among those who are most interested in history, the importance given to the regaining of independence is even greater than among all respondents (62% vs. 52%), while the importance given to the election of Karol Wojtyła as pope is lower. The remaining percentages of indications are quite similar, with the Battle of Warsaw in 1920 and the Yalta Conference standing out among the less frequently mentioned events. It can therefore be assumed that people declaring an above-average interest in history attach greater importance to events with serious political and social consequences than to those with symbolic significance.
I must say, it’s remarkable in all sorts of ways that mere 27 years separated the effective end of Communist Poland and the poll – and still, only around half were able to name that date. And many of those that did clearly found it less important than the accession of John Paul II anyway, which was also considered almost twice as important as the 1939 German invasion – and that’s AFTER declining by a third relative to 2014, when it was apparently considered three times as important as the invasion! (And 10 times more important as the talks which led to the election that ended Communist rule.) Such a rate of decline does make me wonder what the results would say today – considering that the Polish society famously became a lot more critical of the Church after 2016, with mass protests following passage of more severe anti-abortion legislation and multiple explosive documentaries exposing the Church’s role (and JPII’s complicity) in CSA.
And one easily missed aspect is the relatively low importance given to the Swedish Deluge, considering that, well…
> During the wars the Commonwealth lost approximately one third of its population as well as its status as a great power due to invasions by Sweden and Russia.[9] According to Professor Andrzej Rottermund, manager of the Royal Castle in Warsaw, the destruction of Poland in the Deluge was more extensive than the destruction of the country in World War II. Rottermund claims that Swedish invaders robbed the Commonwealth of its most important riches, and most of the stolen items never returned to Poland.[10] Warsaw, the capital of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, was destroyed by the Swedes, and out of a pre-war population of 20,000, only 2,000 remained in the city after the war.[11] According to the 2012 Polish estimates, the material damage caused by the Swedish army amounted to 4 billion złotys. 188 cities and towns, 186 villages, 136 churches, 89 palaces, and 81 castles were completely destroyed in Poland.
There are all sorts of implications about historical memory and cultural differences in these results I cannot even begin to unpack.
So this post about how Rome ensured knowledge and experience was passed on to new generals, and the post from a couple of weeks ago about things like catapults and trebuchets required precision engineering, have me wondering: how did medieval armies actually learn to build things like trebuchets? It seems like the armies of medieval Europe lacked the continuity that Rome gained from standing armies and officer developed described above, and neither did they have the kind of technical documentation that would be enabled by the printing press.
So if you’re a medieval commander and you want to build trebuchets to reduce your enemies to rubble… how do you even know how to do that? And were there failures, in which someone *thought* they knew how to build a trebuchet but it all ended in farce? I’m really curious.
In England, royal castles held stocks of siege engines (not trebuchets but catapults and other devices) and the crown had a number of experts in their construction and maintenance on the payroll (from an article that noted how one such was paid for a site visit in the reign of Henry II). I imagine the other major states had similar arrangements, and the experts would accompany an army in time of war.
That’s interesting, thank you!